Note contents disappearing?

Help
1

I’m using a vault that is synched to my iCloud Drive - whilst I occasionally use my iPad to access files and documents, this very infrequently. I predominantly rely on iCloud to save a backup of my notes.

Recently, I’ve been discovering notes that definitely used to have content in it, suddenly missing when trying to open the note. This is more than a bit inconvenient, as I’m currently using this vault for all my law school notes.

I have attempted to re-synch the vault, and ensuring Obsidian is not active on other devices to cause any kind of sync issues. I have searched version history to restore content, but this only works some of the time. I’ve tried searching through ObsidianHelp, but the advice is more specific to imported notes. All my notes are native to Obsidian and have not been imported from anywhere else. The advice regarding Web Clipper also doesn’t seem relevant.

Maybe I’m missing something really obvious, but I hate opening up notes I need to refer to only to find all the information missing at the worst possible time. Any help would be appreciated!

2

Hi, sorry to hear about the issue.

To start:

  1. what’s your OS? (seems maybe macOS?)
  2. where is that vault stored on the drive? e.g. /Users/YOU/ObsVaults/VAULTNAME or iCloud Drive/Obsidian/VAULTNAME.
4

Yes, macOS Golden Gate 27 - the vault is stored on iCloud Drive. I understand based on George10’s comment that this can result in files appearing missing, but it’s quite odd that entire notes will just be deleted, with the only trace of them ever existing being links to nowhere in other notes.

5

Using the Finder head to the vault → right-click on it to get the context menu → click on Keep Downloaded.

This keeps the vault folder always downloaded. Obsidian needs this work properly.

6

From Obsidian’s point of view that’s probably how it would look if your sync service decided to store a file remotely rather than locally on your hard drive. I expect you can just get it all back at the click of a button (see the message that appeared above this!)

My first reply wrongly quoted something about OneDrive but I guess the same applies to many of these services. There’s some stuff specifically about iCloud on the same page.

7

Thank you both - I’ve adjusted the settings now so hopefully I shouldn’t run into anymore issues. I had a feeling it was probably something obvious!

8

My post was flagged and removed (probably because I mentioned OneDrive rather than iCloud) so here’s the page – Sync your notes across devices - Obsidian Help.

9

Since posting this morning, I have discovered that Obsidian has actually overwritten the content of hundreds of my notes, duplicating content across files. I’ve seen on the forums that this has happened to a number of users as early as July 2025, and to date no real solution has been found. I do hope a solution is found to help others - this has caused a lot of stress on my end as all attempts to recover my data has failed.

10

That sounds especially strange. Can you please share the full output of “Show debug info”?

11

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: 1.14.4
Installer version: 1.14.4
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 27.0.0: Tue Aug 11 21:02:16 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.1.9~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T8112 27.0.0
Login status: not logged in
Language: en-GB
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 6
Plugins enabled: 6
1: File Color v1.1.0
2: Simple CanvaSearch v1.0.2
3: Omnisearch v1.31.0
4: Sheets Extended v2.0.2
5: Highlightr v1.2.2
6: Editing Toolbar v4.1.4

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