One day I noticed Obsidian Sync silently deleted a ton of my files. >:(
These details that may or may not be relevant:
I use the same Obsidian vault on two computers, both Windows. Sync is turned on on both.
On one computer, the folder is on a local disk, backed up by Google Drive.
On the other computer, the folder is network drive provided by Google Drive.
They are the same folder, so both Google Drive and Obsidian Sync are syncing that folder.
These files existed for a long time before they disappeared.
I do not use plugins.
My gut feeling is the following: when the network drive is unavailable, Obsidian Sync just gets totally confused. Besides files being removed, I see file duplications a lot:
Pretty much every week I see a new myfile (1).md popping up somewhere, which was annoying, but I did not suspect it also removes some of my files.
I do not want to use harsh words, but the product I paid for to keep my works safe actually destroyed some of it. I was able to recover most of them, but not all.
I do not have steps to reproduce the bug yet, but I’m happy to provide any further details, or run experiments if that helps you debug the issue.
The (1) are likely created by Gdrive, because Obsidian Sync merges doesn’t create duplicates.
But anyway, In the Obsidian Sync documentation we explicitly tell you not to mix multiple types of sync solutions on the same vault. They end up racing each other.
Thanks for your reply. I see, the documentation mentions this limitation indeed.
I’d like to highlight that there is no mention of that limitation in the app. Sync’s webpage doesn’t mention it either. These were the places where I collected information before subscribing. I did not read the docs as I had no questions. I think that is common behavior.
Given the severity of the issue, I think it would be a user friendly change to display some sort a warning when we turn on Sync.
Also, please consider whether you’d find it friendly behavior if lost your work due to an obscure, non-intuitive limitation only mentioned somewhere in the documentation, and the vendor closed the issue by pointing you to the docs.
I am sorry for the data loss. This is not a limitation specific to Obsidian Sync. If you use any two Synchronization tools on the same directory they can enter in conflict.
We will try to improve the messaging within the App.
I’m also sorry you lost some work. That’s painful.
Your issue wasn’t “closed”. It was moved to help because this isn’t a bug related to Obsidian. And it was marked as solved, so that people finding this thread will see there is an answer at the very top.
If you are using multiple sync tools with any other data in any other apps on your computer(s), you should fix that as well.
I also highly recommend you to investigate ways to backup your data. Cloud syncing tools are not the same thing as backups.
