Obsidian Sync ignores files with "illegal" characters

Bug graveyard
1

I started syncing my vault for the first time, and noticed that files with “illegal” names are causing errors in the sync log.

My main vault copy is located on a Macbook, the location I want to sync to is iPad (mobile beta).

The problem seemingly applies only to files with “:” symbol, files with symbols “?” or “|” were not affected.

This is an excerpt from sync log on Macbook:

2021-04-17 10:37 - Connecting to server
...
2021-04-17 10:44 - Uploading file Notes/References/Turing-NLG: A 17B LM by Microsoft.md
2021-04-17 10:44 - Upload complete Notes/References/Turing-NLG: A 17B LM by Microsoft.md
2021-04-17 10:44 - Server pushed Notes/References/Turing-NLG: A 17B LM by Microsoft.md
2021-04-17 10:44 - Ignoring remote file name with illegal characters Notes/References/Turing-NLG: A 17B LM by Microsoft.md
...
2021-04-17 10:46 - Uploading file Notes/Systems design for advanced beginners | Robert Heaton.md
2021-04-17 10:46 - Server pushed Notes/Systems design for advanced beginners | Robert Heaton.md
2021-04-17 10:46 - Upload complete Notes/Systems design for advanced beginners | Robert Heaton.md
...
2021-04-17 10:50 - Fully synced

During syncing on iPad, the same file names were shown in pop-up errors. These files were not downloaded. Files with other “illegal” characters (e.g. “|”) were downloaded successfully.

(I can’t share relevant excerpts from iPad, however: the “Copy sync log” button copies only the last 950 lines of the log, and you can’t scroll further that 950 lines in GUI either. The “errors only” option hides all lines.)

My environment: macOS Catalina, Obsidian v0.11.13, installer version v0.8.15; iPad OS 14.5, Obsidian Mobile v0.0.16 (3).

2

I fail to understand how this is a problem.
What’s your expected behaviour?

: and / aren’t allowed on mac filesystem.

3

Actually, : is allowed in Unix names. This was exactly why these files existed in the first place. You can easily create one, too:

$ touch "test:file"
$ ls
test:file

So a significant number of notes in my vault has : in their names and work with Obsidian perfectly. The only problem is during the sync.

I was surprised by your claim that : is a forbidden character on Mac, and it looks like it was the case before OS X (so, a long time ago). Now it is just the Finder that don’t allow creation of files with “:”, not the filesystem. See macos - When did the colon character : become an allowed character in the filesystem? - Ask Different

4

This is a big mess made my Apple and we don’t wanna have any part in it.
I don’t think we allow you to create a file with : within obsidian. I believe several other Mac apps don’t allow it or transform it to -.

I am not going to take this as bug.
You can open a feature request, but ultimately it’s Apple that has to clear this.

5

Thank you for your reply. I understand your position, it’s better to be safe than sorry. I think I’ll just rename my notes.

However, I am sure that if you just remove : from a list of forbidden characters for Mac, everything will work absolutely fine. For example, I am sure that your IDE handles files with colons without any complaint. Why this should be different in the IDE for thoughts? :slight_smile:

6

I am sure that if you just remove : from a list of forbidden characters for Mac, everything will work absolutely fine.

Obsidian is cross-platform, and colons are not supported on Windows, as far as I understand.

7

Aside windows, which has its own blacklist, the thing is Apple still considers : a reserved character at OS-level (not FS level). We should honor that.

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