Obsidian is crashing and deleting my notes while I type them

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I am pretty new to Obsidian and trying to use it to storyboard. It was working fine, but recently it’s been crashing on me and deleting parts of my notes as I type them. For example, I will be typing out a sentence and then halfway through the sentence several words will just get deleted and I’ll get a notification in the top right hand corner of my screen that says, ‘“Note” has been modified externally, merging changes automatically.’ While I do have Obsidian on multiple devices (and I am using Icloud to sync), I am not editing on multiple devices at once. I want to be able to write my notes without them just randomly deleting mid sentence and making me retype right after I wrote them.

Even weirder, when I have restarted the Obsidian app, I have found that the note that was glitching out on me will have like 20 duplicates, all with no content whatsoever on them, just the same name as the original note plus a number. So then I have to go and delete all of those notes before I can continue writing.

Things I have tried

I have tried exiting out of the app and reopening it to restart it, and restarting my computer. I have also relogged into Icloud a few times but I am pretty sure this is an Obsidian problem and I’m really annoyed by what’s going on. Any ideas?

2

Do you have Obsidian running on more than one system? That might be bad.

Also, try moving your vault off of iCloud.

Just a thought or two.

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What do you mean having it running on multiple systems? Also are you suggesting moving it off iCloud permanently or just temporarily? I’m so sorry if I sound dumb, I’m just very bad with computers and apps in general

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On which devices are you using iCloud to store and sync your notes ? :thinking:

I mean, using iCloud to store your notes and sync them between a Windows computer and some Apple devices is known to not be the greatest options :sweat_smile: …

From the documentation: Sync your notes across devices - Obsidian Help

iCloud can be used to sync vaults between iOS and macOS. However, iCloud Drive on Windows may lead to file duplication or corruption.

The other possibility, if you’re on a Windows computer could be that OneDrive (or another storage/sync service) is competing with iCloud to get a hold of your notes :woman_shrugging:
(I don’t own a Windows computer so this is just a thought :blush: )

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5

This seems like a common situation where iCloud Drive isn’t set properly and is offloading files to the cloud as you type.

All folders and files/notes in iCloud Drive/Obsidian/YOUR-VAULT-NAME need to be set as ‘Keep Downloaded’ so they aren’t offloaded.

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6

“What do you mean having it running on multiple systems?”

I suspect that if you have two systems actively running Obsidian on a vault shared between them, Obsidian might get into race conditions. I don’t think two computers can access a vault simultaneously.

It would be an easy test to copy the cloud version of your vault to a local disk folder. If the problem disappeared it would narrow your focus on what to look for.

Just shotgunning, looking for ways to eliminate variables.

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