Obsidian cleared my vault again

Bug reports
1

Steps to reproduce

Unknown. Doesn’t seem to be caused by Obsidian updates, I’ve been on latest for a while. I don’t use Obsidian Sync.

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

I’ve read it but didn’t find anything relevant I could try to investigate the issue further.

Expected result

Never touch my files without my action.

Actual result

All vault files are gone. The .obsidian folder remains with just four files, looks like some kind of default. All the subfolders are gone as well (snippets, plugins, …).

Environment

Happened a few months ago on Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and today again on macOS Catalina 10.15.7

Additional information

Not sure what’s going on here. I see similar complaints from people, but not really a definitive answer what is going on or what we can do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for considering this!

2

Do you use iClould or any other third party sync system?

If so, did you configure it so that files are kept local?

About the Bug reports category - #11 by system.

1 Like
3

Hey @WhiteNoise,

thanks for following up on this. No, no sync whatsoever, in both cases. I have iCloud completely turned off on the Mac.

But even if I did - would it explain the .obsidian dir with just the 4 files? It typically contains a number of other files, plugin dirs, snippets etc. I’d expect it to be all gone at least… strange.

4

So the problem with iCloud (and some other third party sync services) is that they may configured to only keep a few files locally and the other files are only apperently local but really downloaded on demand. So you need to set up iClould to keep the files local.

Back to your case, where is your vault stored exactly, which directory?

5

I see. So I just did a quick test by creating a new empty vault, and the .obsidian dir contains exactly the files I was left with earlier (ignoring .DS_Store):

test tree -Da                                                                                   
[Oct  5 23:09]  .
├── [Oct  5 23:09]  .DS_Store 
└── [Oct  5 23:09]  .obsidian
    ├── [Oct  5 23:09]  app.json
    ├── [Oct  5 23:09]  appearance.json
    ├── [Oct  5 23:09]  core-plugins.json
    └── [Oct  5 23:09]  workspace.json
  • /Users/username/kb/on macOS Catalina,
  • /data/notes/ on Pop!_OS (auto-mounted second disk, same thing happened a few months back, also no sync, just backups).