[MacOS]: Obsidian does not save and get stuck in a limbo state (failed to save - Timed out)

Just FYI, the panics are saved in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports. In case you want to open it up to review… look for any *.panic files.

We are not sure exactly what’s going on here. We believe that on some mac systems node.fs and osx do not play well and the writing queue gets stuck. This is not an Obsidian’s problem but a deeper/lower level issue.

In 0.12.5, Licat introduced a periodic safety check on the writing queue and if there is no progress, you will get a warning inviting to restart obsidian.

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Hi, I’ve tried without community plugins and I didn’t have any problems.

These evening I tried enabling just:

  • Contextual Typography
  • Hider
  • Sliding Panes
  • Style Settings

and Obsidian (v0.12.5) froze again.

I’ll try disabling one by one those plugins.

@Paolo_Santucci can you post a screen recording when it’s frozen?

Do you see any errors in console?
Can you wait a minute and see what happens?

Can you join discord DM licat and help us debug this?

Curious what you find here, as I also use these. Since updating to 0.12.5 I haven’t run in to this issue, though :crossed_fingers:

It’s probably a coincidence, but it seemed I encountered this most often (prior to 0.12.5) when I was using the languagetool plugin.

I am not sure if we are conflating different issues here.

@mgmeyers if this happens for you please do DM licat and try to figure out if this out.

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I’m sorry, but I forgot to check the console! :sweat:

When It’ll happen again I’ll DM Licat

Hi,

I’ve also been doing a little experiment on my end. I started using Obsidian pretty recently and this bug happened 3 times in the span of my two first days (with a few plugins).
Then following your advice I turned off all third-party plugins and it didn’t happen for the next few days.

I re-added VaultStats, BetterWordCount and Hotkeys++ on the 13th and it happened again on that very evening.
Today I removed both of them and turned on Emoji Toolbar and Tracker and it happened again right now.

From my observations, it would seem like the issue isn’t a specific third party plugin but just having at least one enabled :thinking:.

Anyways this time I thought of turning on the console and this is what shows up (no errors):

Obsidian Developer Console
main.ts:10 Loading Hotkeys++ plugin
main.ts:10 Loading vault-statistics Plugin
main.ts:38 loading obsidian-tracker plugin

Some of those are supposed to be disabled but I’m not sure if they came back from the dead as part of the bug, if I just have a bad memory or just don’t know how to click a button (I’m not ruling out any of these options).

Anyways I currently have the app in limbo with the console opened and I just DMed Licat.

UPDATE: we were able to get some more info, but it’s not resolved yet there’s still mysterious stuff going on.

For info this is my environment:

  • Operating system: macOS Big Sur 11.4
    • 16 Go of Ram
    • Processor : 2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
    • Graphic Card : Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB
  • Obsidian version: v0.12.4 / Electron : v12.0.6

Hi,
This is the first time I’ve this issue: a small window with the message that the file fail to save and obsidian get stuck.
I closed and reopened Obsidian, opened the “File Recovery” > Snapshots and the last snapshot had 0KB (nothing, empty).
I don’t have any sync system active, only simple local files.

Obsidian Version: 0.12.5
OS: macOS Big Sur 11.4

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I am not sure I understand you. If it happens again, post a screen recording.

Are older snapshot available?

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The “small window” was like the usual black “notice-container” on right-top side that appears when we check plugins update. Next time I’ll try to capture a screen recording, but the “notice-container” it’ll be impossible to record (very fast mesage).

About the snapshots, yes, the older are available.

do you rememebr the text of that window?

sorry but no. something with the file name and the word “unsuccessful”. but I’m not sure about it.

ok, thanks!

Hi, I had this issue again. In the last weeks I’ve used Obsidian only on iOS/iPadOS and this seems a Mac only issue.

I’ve seen a notification saying that the file couldn’t be saved. Fortunately this time in the version history I’ve found a copy with almost all the note.

This is the log:

app.js:1 Obsidian Developer Console
main.ts:27 loading markdown-table-editor plugin
main.ts:38 loading obsidian-tracker plugin
main.ts:10 Loading Hotkeys++ plugin
main.ts:38 Dataview: Version 0.4.x Loaded
main.ts:17 Light mode active
main.ts:9 e
main.ts:49 Loading the DEVONlink plugin.
main.ts:49 loading Find unlinked files and unresolved links plugin
main.ts:5 Loading the macOS Keyboard Navigation plugin.
main.ts:55 Loading Markdown-Prettifier
main.ts:31 Loading Note Refactor plugin
main.ts:15 loading Sort & Permute lines
VM252:3828 [Calendar] Trying to switch Moment.js global locale to it, got it
index.ts:351 Dataview: Parsed all file prefixes (0.003s)
index.ts:242 Dataview: Task & metadata parsing queued in 0.002s.
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 16, ch 143
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 16
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 16
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 17, ch 0
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 17
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 17
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 16, ch 209
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 16
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 16
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 17, ch 0
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 17
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 17
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 18, ch 138
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 18
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 18
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 19, ch 0
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 19
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 19
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 18, ch 229
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 18
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 18
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 19, ch 0
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 19
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 19
index.html:1 Uncaught (in promise) Timed out.
app.js:1 Timed out.
(anonymous) @ app.js:1
app.js:1 Uncaught (in promise) Timed out.
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 20, ch 389
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 20
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 20
obsidian-text-editor.ts:19 getCursorPosition was called: line 21, ch 0
obsidian-text-editor.ts:46 acceptsTableEdit was called on row 21
obsidian-text-editor.ts:52 getLine was called on line 21
app.js:1 Sync Error!
app.js:1 Timed out.
(anonymous) @ app.js:1
app.js:1 Timed out.
(anonymous) @ app.js:1
app.js:1 Uncaught (in promise) Timed out.
index.html:1 Uncaught (in promise) Timed out.
app.js:1 Sync Error!
app.js:1 Timed out.
(anonymous) @ app.js:1
DevTools failed to load SourceMap: Could not parse content for app://obsidian.md/pickr.min.js.map: Unexpected end of JSON input
index.html:1 Uncaught (in promise) Timed out.

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@WhiteNoise I just experienced this again last night (on 0.12.19). Whether it’s a bug in Obsidian, a macOS bug, or an Electron/Node bug is basically irrelevant to me since I can do nothing about it, and the end result is the same: data loss.

I have a script that monitors my vault, scanning and alerting for 0-byte files, and got a notification from it this morning when I logged in. I checked and found that a note I was editing last night at 7:58pm had been completely wiped. The last version in Obsidian’s File Recovery was from 7:56pm. Unfortunately, in that single 2 minute timespan, I had made considerable edits to the note, which were all lost. I’m 100% certain of these edits, because I had pasted an image as part of the changes, and that image was still there in my /attach folder.

My File Recovery interval had been set at 2 minutes (I just lowered it to 1).

The question is: I’ve never once had Obsidian prompt me about this write queue being stuck or seen the warning inviting to restart. What would trigger it? Any settings that can be checked/tuned? I would like to get to the bottom of this, and would be willing to suffer the performance consequences of cranking my loop down to e.g. 1 second in order to ensure that I capture this problem when it occurs, and hopefully help figure out what’s causing it. This bug gives me extreme anxiety. It’s like my second brain has Alzheimers.

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Can someone please tag this topic be tagged with data-loss as well so it shows up in the category e.g. Topics tagged data-loss)

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Has anybody had this issue since manually upgrading to version 0.12.19?