I use a plugin to sync notes between Obsidian and a different program (Zotero). A glitch in the plugin led to overriding those five notes, and, in trying to fix it, I accidentally “unsynced” those notes from Obsidian. So now the File Recovery plugin cannot even see these notes (they’ve just ceased to exist within the Obsidian environment). Does anyone know of a way around this? Is there a way to get File Recovery to see previous files? Or is there any other way of trying to recover the prior versions of these notes from Obsidian. (Zotero itself has very bad recovery options, so trying to recover from that end seems impossible.) Thanks!
Sorry to hear that. So if I understand, you are using both Obsidian Sync plus this other syncing tool?
Mixing two or more sync tools is generally a bad idea.
First just to check, you know that you have to search for a file in File Recovery? Just checking. If you are searching and it is gone, then the only option might be in your backups. And unfortunately, if you weren’t keeping backups (sync is not backup), there might not be any other options except potential hard drive forensics (expensive and difficult).
Okay, thanks for letting me know–thought it was worth a shot. I do have backups, but I only keep them daily and every week, and unfortunately the write-over seems to have happened about a week before I discovered it–and right before my weekly backup.
And no, the syncing tool I’m talking about is not for syncing my Obsidian notes across computers (I just use one tool for that). The syncing tool in question (Better Notes) is only for syncing Obsidian notes with Zotero, a separate app.
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I don’t fully understand the specifics of that. But in general, if two tools – of any scope or size – have the ability to read and write in the same location, you’ll risk data being overwritten or conflicted.
If that Zotero sync is only going one-way from your vault, maybe there is less risk. But if it’s also writing to your vault from Zotero, it still might be what caused this to happen.
Aren’t Zotero’s recovery options okay, as long as you have backups? Although I do agree that the process is not user-friendly, especially compared to Obsidian’s file recovery.
But of course, if you don’t have a backup with the relevant data, then it’s not much use. What about the Zotero trash, is there anything in there?
The tool in question is the Better Notes addon for Zotero, which can do two-way sync between Zotero’s internal notes and external copies of the same notes in a configured directory. @macrospect has written a writeup on this setup: Zotero Better Notes plugin (syncs notes with Obsidian)