Obsidian sync overwrites file without sync history causing permanent data loss

Bug graveyard
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Repro
0. Make sure tomorrow’s daily note does not exist

  1. Create tomorrow’s daily note on iPhone, write some content, while offline
  2. Create tomorrow’s daily note on Mac, write some content, observe note syncs to Obsidian sync
  3. Take iPhone out of offline mode, allow it to finish syncing

Observe that tomorrow’s daily note from Mac has overwritten the one on iPhone (because it is more recent). Further because the iPhone version never got a chance to sync into cloud in the first place, it does not exist in obsidian sync history.

At this point, the data written from iPhone is irreversibly lost. strong text

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This is not a bug but it’s intentional. Generally, Obsidian merges the content of notes in different devices.

There is one exception, say a note is present in device A and synchronized to the remote vault. You then create the same note in device B. If the creation time in device B is within 3 minutes of the last sync time of B, the version of device A wins (there’s no merge). A copy of what was in device B originally should be in file recovery plugin (and a forced flush has been added in the dev build).

This special case was introduced to support people who have daily notes with templates open at startup.

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