Migrating Vault from iCloud to OneDrive, filenames

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Migrating Vault from iCloud to OneDrive, filenames

Hello dear Obsidian Community

Most of my professional and semi-professional notes are in Obsidian, which I sync through iCloud. My workplace recently restricted the use of external devices such as laptops, and forces me to use a corporate Lenovo laptop. As I am cognitively lost without my Obsidian vault, which I spent 4 years filling and structuring, I want to resume using it as soon as possible.

What I want to do

My company’s policy allows syncing of OneDrive for Business and OneDrive personal, so this would be an option for the vault, albeit it won’t be possible to sync it with my iPad anymore, I reckon. That’s the lesser harm.

While uploading my Vault from iCloud to OneDrive, it permanently crashed. My notes are in German, French, English, and Turkish, so many file names have special characters that aren’t a problem in iCloud but don’t work in OneDrive, it seems. I have probably hundreds of notes.

What I tried

Batch renaming them with Better Finder Rename yields the result that plenty of internal links aren’t working anymore. Changing manually the names of > 500 file names isn’t an option I’d like to do if there is a workaround. Two questions:

  1. Why does OneDrive suck and not allow for characters like umlauts and accents?

  2. How can I efficiently rename hundreds of files while keeping the internal links intact?

I’m looking forward to any hint or idea.

2

  1. Restrictions and limitations in OneDrive and SharePoint - Microsoft Support

  2. Two ways I can think of:

  • Write a Templater script that removes invalid characters from your file names. With Automatically update internal links turned on, Obsidian should update links on its own (though I am not 100% sure for multiple file renaming, so test it first)

  • Use the Bases plugin to list all files and add a formula that outputs cleaned filenames. You’ll still need to rename each file manually via right-click, since in Bases file name column can’t be changed directly, but this speeds things up compared to doing every file on its own.

Maybe someone else comes up with a better solution.

EDIT: Maybe also have a look at this.

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Thanks, good advice!

I also noticed that, in fact, the issue is smaller than I thought. OneDrive can’t handle some special characters like Ş, while umlauts and accents, in fact, can be used as file names. Thus, it’s just a few dozen filenames to rename.