Here is an attempt to gather information about the error condition. I hope I managed to catch even some new information to help remedy the situation.
I have used Obsidian now for a month or two and have written about three hundred files to my vault. I have experienced this bug for two or three times on macOS and one time on iOS. I do not know if the iOS bug was the same as this one though, I did not have opportunity at the time to look at it in any detail.
In chronological order. I’m annoyed in retrospect for not recording time stamps.
- Obsidian gave a popup that the file system operation timed out.
- I checked for zero size files in Finder and the current file I was editing shows it has no content on disk.
- The contents were still on screen so I copied the text to another program.
- I then tested if I could write to the folder with TextEdit and it worked fine.
- Finder shows the iCloud cloud symbol on the vault folder, icon has a mouse over text “Downloading”
- On the subfolder the iCloud icon mouse over is “Waiting to Update”
- No files in the folder show the cloud icon.
- After awhile the Vault cloud icon mouse over text changed to “Waiting to Update” also.
- The issue has not resolved in about half an hour.
- My vault folder shows that 3 bytes are left from the download, seems stuck.
- Writing to the vault with Obsidian on my iPhone works ok.
- Phone also sees the current file that I was working on as empty.
- Obsidian still shows the popup infrequently that the filesystem operation timed out.
- Also tried to use another Electron app Discord to save an image to the vault folder and it worked ok.
- Tried creating a new file with Obsidian and it does not react to the command.
- I divided the workspace to two panes and the new pane shows that no file is open and displays the buttons to create or open files.
- Tried creating a new file by pressing the button, but with no reaction from Obsidian.
- Tried to click a file in the Obsidian file explorer, the pane changed from showing the no file open screen to show a file called “No File”, and I can now write text in the window, the file does not exist and the text does not get written to disk. The file I clicked on the file pane was left untouched.
- Curiously the behavior of Obsidian changed. If I now close the “No File” pane and then split the pane again Obsidian shows the “No File” named file again instead of the screen with the buttons.
- The original pane on the screen has a link, I clicked the link and Obsidian reloaded the current file in its empty state.
- Running out of ideas to try, I pressed Cmd-R for Force Reload and Obsidian resolved its state and started functioning normally again.
- Even after the situation seems resolved and Obsidian is working as normal, the vault folder in Finder shows the cloud icon stuck on “Waiting to Update”.
- I have two other Obsidian instances open on different vaults, unfortunately I didn’t test them at the time the error occurred. However the other vaults work as normal without requiring reloading.
- On the following day the iCloud cloud icon on the vault folder is still stuck, seems to be permanently stuck.
Obsidian version 0.13.23 (installer version 0.13.23).
macOS BigSur ver. 11.6.1
MacBook Pro 13-inch, M1, 2020, 16Gb, 2Tb
iCloud+, iCloud Drive 200Gb, with Optimize Mac Storage option turned off and 45.61Gb available space.
I have two users on my other MacBook Pro, both use same Obsidian installation but on different vaults, both were loaded but the computer was sleeping at the time of error.
I also have Dropbox, but do not use it with Obsidian. Mentioning it just because it is notorious for misbehaving and has caused problems for me previously.
I do not have Time Machine enabled on this machine, but my other MacBook Pro does take Time Machine backups from all my vaults to QNap NAS. I did not realize to check if Time Machine was active on the other computer during the error. It does that even while sleeping.
Again, I hope this helps.