Obsidian out of sync with disk

Help
1

My Obsidian search and file open data is out of date with changes made on disk in VS Code. When working, I make changes both on the local hard drive and inside of Obsidian.

In the past, changes to the disk were visible immediately in Obsidian. That still happens if I reformat a specific file that might also be open in Obsidian.

However, bulk changes in Obsidian 1.9.12 don’t show up in Obsidian. I’m used to seeing changes refresh fast enough to remove things from a search list. Which it will if I click on an item.

However, right after the bulk change, those changes don’t show up in Obsidian. I cannot tell if it takes time to update (as if Obsidian has some kind of file cache) or is the operating system not signaling the change.

I’m on Windows 10. An old Lenovo T450 with 8 GB of RAM. Sometimes, a virus scan or indexing brings the system to a crawl. After time the search index still has the wrong text (preview) yet when I click I eventually get the right text in the editor.

Because I use Git to track changes, as long as I check work in after the bulk search and replace, I don’t lose anything if I edit something outdated in Obsidian.

I’d rather not wait 15 minutes after a bulk replace to make sure I have the right files in Obsidian. Microsoft might see that as an opportunity to run some other stupid can to slow down my machine.

image
image1600×900 108 KB

2

Hi @hittjw , fellow user here.

Not a solution, but perhaps a workaround: invoke the “Reload app without saving” command, which will restart Obsidian in-place and force it to re-open your vault. That should bring all your changes into Obsidian.

To do this, you can type Ctrl-P to bring up the command pallete, then type “rel” to filter for “Reload app without saving”, then select it to restart. At one point I was reloading a lot to refresh scripts, and so I assigned a hotkey to it.

Hope this helps,

Craig

2 Likes
3

It’s a short time later. This indexing impacts bases too.

image
image1600×900 110 KB

  • A search shows type: Config as well as bases table shows the same.
  • VS Code search finds nothing on the disk with ^type: Config$ because tag was changed.
  • At least 10 minutes have passed. Other files were edited.
  • When opening any of these files, I do see the type: Configuration as expected.

What I suspect is there is some kind of caching to make Obsidian more responsive that isn’t seeing that

4

I can give it a try. For as long as my Obsidian takes to load, it might get old. I typically know what I’ve edited, so I close all the tabs and wait.

When I do a bulk change, or edit in a different tool, I finish the editing session before returning to obsidian – then sync to github. I don’t edit in both at the same time.

A reindex from the disk does find the changes. And if I reopen a tab in 15 to 20 minutes, then files are what I expect them to be.

5

This may be due to a known limitation of the node.js-based file watcher on widows.

1 Like
6

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.