Hi all. I’ve been using Obsidian on Mac for ages with iCloud drive and it works well. I’m using it on Windows now and the files tend to sync well for the most part. What I’m finding, though, is that when I make changes to my preferences (in particular, to settings in the AnuPpuccin theme in the Style Settings community plugin), and then exit Obsidian, when I open it again, those settings are all lost.
Where abouts should I be looking to see if there is a file that Windows is having trouble writing to in iCloud drive which is causing this issue?
All your settings, community themes and plugins, etc. are in the VAULTNAME/.obsidian folder. You may need to set Windows File Explorer to show hidden files and folders.
A heads up though: when someone mentions
“iCloud on Windows” in the Obsidian Discord; this is the auto-response from Carl:
iCloud on Windows is known to cause file duplication and corruption issues. We highly suggest avoiding using this combination.
Ok thanks, good to know. Might be worth paying for Obsidian Sync, then. I just looked into it and had originally avoided it for security reasons, but now see I can provide my own encryption key, so I think it’s a go-er again. Question, though… in my .obsidian/ folder, I have HEAPS of “workspace 21.json” etc files (incremental numbers) and also “workspace(2).json” files, again with incremental numbers. What are these?
If you open one of the workspace.json files in a text editor you can have a look.
All the stuff at the top is your workspace layout (what tabs and/or tab groups you have open, where they are on the screen, if your left Sidebar is open or closed, etc.). Towards the bottom is the ribbon order and icons hidden or not, and finally your last opened files list.
You can safely remove the numbered ones, only workspace.json will be currently in use. Have a look at the date modified metadata though.
That’s the “file duplication” the warning was talking about.
When they get duplicated, they get copied with numbers. (Different cloud tools duplicate files differently. Dropbox adds the date, for example.)
And so when you said:
[quote=“epicpilgrim, post:1, topic:69968”]
when I open it again, those settings are all lost.
[/quote]
The settings aren’t actually getting “lost”. They are getting written with the extra number because of the sync duplication. But Obsidian keeps looking at the older settings file with no number.
