This has happened twice now: I’ve come back to a note and noticed that some portion of it has disappeared — not even full lines, but some lines that got cut in half. Looking at the revision history, it attributes the change to “1 revision via iPhone”.
I’ve never opened either of these notes on my iPhone, so this certainly wasn’t some inadvertent edit on my part.
Yes. This seems similar to this issue but not the same; I’m not having things duplicated but rather removed. As this is data loss it’s a good bit more concerning to me.
Expected result
Nothing gets modified.
Actual result
File gets modified.
Environment
On windows:
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.7.7
Installer version: v1.7.7
Operating system: Windows 11 Enterprise 10.0.26100
Login status: logged in
Language: en
Catalyst license: insider
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 2
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 6
Plugins enabled: 3
1: Calendar v1.5.10
2: List Callouts v1.2.7
3: Ninja Cursor v0.0.13
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Custom theme and snippets: for cosmetic issues, please first try updating your theme and disabling your snippets. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community theme and snippets.
Community plugins: for bugs, please first try updating all your plugins to latest. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community plugins.
No merge conflicts. I just checked my logs and don’t see any. (And as I mentioned, I never edited these files on my phone, only on my PC.)
Both of the problematic files appear to be from the same sync — they have the same timestamp. I had edited those notes on my PC previously, then presumably opened Obsidian on my phone and that’s when they got synced and corrupted.
I’m noticing the similar behavior between Android app & macos desktop app along with the daily note feature. I believe the scenario is:
start writing something on my phone and sync it (page is created, but laptop is offline and doesn’t receive it yet)
open laptop later, I write some new stuff (I can’t remember if I see both things or just the new stuff, but it gets merged later)
I open phone later, and it seems to delete what was written on laptop
I revert to previous revision that contains everything
in my version history I see the following entries in chronological order:
empty page (via phone)
new entries from phone (via phone)
new entries from phone and laptop merged (via laptop)
removal of laptop changes (via phone)
revert to revision
So sounds like the phone is overwriting stuff on first load, but not entirely sure why. This might also happen vice versa (laptop overwriting things written on phone).
This scenario has happened several times now on the paid plan. As a long-time Roam user with such issues, I’m somewhat tempted to run back, or switch away from the the obsidian paid plan and use a community sync-to-github plugin or similar.
Restricted mode was off, but I never installed any community plugins (would that change anything?). I can try turning on restricted mode for a while and try to reproduce.
The daily notes core plugin is enabled on both desktop and mobile for me.
Upon playing with it a bit, I managed to reliably reproduce something similar, which might be linked to what I’ve been seeing:
have both laptop and mobile open, make sure both are synced
disconnect laptop from internet
on laptop, create a new page “test page” and add some identifying text “hello world from laptop”
on mobile, create page with the same name “test page” and add some different test “this is a test from mobile”
wait for mobile to sync
restore laptop internet connection
after some seconds, whatever was written on the laptop should disappear and be replaced with the text written on mobile
In the version history, only the mobile additions are visible. Notably, this is different to the version history before, where at least both histories were preserved and I could restore. In this case, a restore is not possible and data is lost.
This happens reliably if I follow the instructions exactly. It happens even if the page is created and sync-ed first before going offline. I also tried it swapping laptop/mobile in the instructions, and basically the same thing happened, except I needed to start editing a bit on mobile after connecting it back to the internet, and then it nuked what was written on mobile.
I believe the expected behavior here is to merge the different histories, saving as much as text as possible, no? Otherwise, I’d be too scared writing offline notes in Obsidian, since the daily note page creation might nuke the offline changes or vice versa.
So the key thing here is that enough time has lapsed between when you created the mobile note, and when you first synced the laptop note, that it makes it very hard for a proper merge to happen.
Consider this, as an example:
It is 9 am, and I make a note on my laptop in offline mode. The created date is 2025-02-01 09:00 and the modified date is 2025-02-01 09:05.
Later, at 2025-02-01 14:00, I make the same note on my phone. Phone is online. I make edits until 2025-02-01 15:30.
Then I get home, and at 2025-02-01 16:00, I connect the laptop to the internet. The note’s created date is still 2025-02-01 09:00 and the modified date is still 2025-02-01 09:05.
Sync views this as an older version, and depending on the contents, how much is done, etc, it will either try to merge, or overwrite.
The behavior is not unexpected, so not quite a bug. But we’ll be the first to admit this scenario could be handled better. That will take time and is not something we can fix this day today.
For now, my recommendation is to not create the files as named the same if you need to keep one or more devices in offline. Instead, name them different, and then merge them in later with note composer or by hand.
Thanks for detailed replies! I agree it’s a tricky problem in general. With Roam, they somehow manage to always preserve data. Though, it might be easier for them, since they represent documents as lists of indented blocks, each assigned with an ID, so any modifications are tied to the ID. So you might lose data if you edit the same block on both screens (since I assume they do normal merging there). For obsidian, it seems like the entire page is a roam block. But not entirely sure of the details.
In my scenario above, I believe the best way to handle it is to merge (specifically there a concat), to avoid data-loss while offline. In fact, I can’t ever think of a scenario where I’d actually want an overwrite operation, unless I explicitly press delete. If that’s difficult for some reason, I wonder if having a manual merging process could help: either a special UI for showing multiple versions of the same document coming from different unrelated histories/devices (e.g. a dropdown on the version history page), or simply renaming the files “my doc” and “my doc (2)”.
Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help out with this! For now I’ll heed your advice and avoid editing the same document on multiple devices offline. Unfortunately, I do edit offline often, so I might just avoid using Obsidian offline altogether out of an abundance of caution.
I use Obsidian on Linux and on several iOS/iPadOS devices
I use the daily notes plugin
I have the sync plugin set up using Obsidian Sync with end to end encryption
I typically add to the daily note from multiple devices throughout the day. These devices might not have reliable internet connections
Sometimes the daily note gets overwritten with an older version. There isn’t a warning about a merge failure or a backup file that I can find, it’s just silently overwritten.
Here’s a screenshot of File Recovery from the my laptop where I wrote the content that was overwritten on sync
That will take time and is not something we can fix this day today.
