Obsidian not opening (Mac)

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

Open my vault in Obsidian

What happens

It tries to load my vault for ages, then it says “An error has occurred. Error: File system operation timed out.” It gives me the option to either reload the app or open another vault.

Things I have tried

Restarting the app, restarting my mac, opening different vaults, putting the files in my vault into one folder and opening that folder as a new vault

Extra info

This problem started right after I updated my macbook to Sonoma 14.4.1
I’m on a macbook pro (M1)
I use Obsidian for pretty much everything so this is quite an alarming problem for me

2

Where is your vault on disk? Is it in a sync folder like iCloud Drive or something like that?

If in iCloud Drive, you’ll want to make sure System Settings > Apple ID > iCloud -> Optimize Mac Storage is disabled. That can cause issues if it’s enabled, like files and folders in your Obsidian vault being randomly removed from your device.

3

Thanks for replying, I’m not good with tech stuff so apologies if my replies aren’t as helpful/detailed as they can be

My vault is on iCloud Drive, and thank you I’ve just turned off Optimising Mac Storage, it was on before

4

Okay! That’s a start. Using the macOS Finder, if you go into iCloud Drive/Obsidian/<VAULT-NAME>, make sure there aren’t any cloud icons next to files/folders in the Obsidian folder. If there are, right click and Download now (or similar).

That should make sure all the files and folders in your vault are local, and Obsidian isn’t missing anything.

5

There was a cloud icon next to my files, I’ve right-clicked and clicked ‘Download now’

When I did that to the files with the cloud icon, they turned into this:
image

6

They don’t appear to be downloading? Left them for a bit, iCloud Drive’s been stuck on this without moving

image
image1092×154 21.3 KB

7

I haven’t seen this icon on my devices, but I have seen it in posts before. What’s the free space on that drive look like? Plenty? Cutting it close?

Now that Optimize Mac Storage is off, maybe try restarting the mac to see if it gets iCloud Drive unstuck?

8

Restarted my Mac, iCloud Drive still seems to be stuck unfortunately.

Storage on iCloud I’ve got 42.02 GB left (out of 200 GB), I’m unsure if that’s a lot or not to be honest but it seems like a reasonable chunk?

(Also sorry for the late reply, got side-tracked)

9

Oh wait hold on, the iCloud Drive specifically (my bad): 66.4 GB used up by it, unsure how much is left

10

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