Obsidian Sync incorrectly duplicates sections of files

Bug reports
,
78

Let me add a quick note here. I plan to review all the sync threads in bug reports and overhaul the docs about this matter.

The issue of duplication, as far as we are able to reproduce it, happens when there are multiple independent changes to a note.
For example we begin with Note A that is synchronized in both device 1 and device 2.
If device 1 and device 2 both independently make changes to note A, without having the possibility to synchronize in between, then the automatic merge algorithm can produce undesirable outputs, often in the forum of duplicated sections.
However, there is no way really to fix this, because when there are multiple conflicting changes, only YOU (the user) know what’s right. No algorithm can merge them correctly.

There are currently two way to go about this:

  1. You either let the automatic merge algorithm attempt. If it fails, you can manually look in the previous versions of Note A which are in the sync version history and file recovery version history.
  2. Disable the automatic merging in case of conflict (We have recently introduce this). In this case, every time there is one of these “merge conflict with independent edits” an additional Note A-conflict will be generated and you have to manually review it Note A and Note A-conflict for changes..