Obsidian updated and vaults (which were in icloud) are gone

Help
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What I’m trying to do

recover my vaults :frowning: they are no where to be found after obsidian updated.
one day i went to open obsidian, and it was just a fresh vault with no other reference to old vaults. my vaults were stored on icloud, they’re gone.

Things I have tried

i found a few other posts that said that when obsidian auto-updated, it deleted their vaults.
i had two vaults that were stored on icloud. i’ve been using them for 2+ years and they hold a wealth of information for me. they’re not there. i can’t find them anywhere.

i’m using a mac, i did not recently update my os, and i made sure that icloud isn’t optimizing storage.

i WAS using plugins, several of them that i don’t remember – something to make tables, something to make .md writing look nicer, etc.

2

If you use the mac’s Finder and navigate to iCloud Drive/Obsidian/ is there anything in that Obsidian folder?

You could also have a look on https://www.icloud.com/ in the iCloud Drive section:

Recover files deleted from iCloud Drive or iWork apps

  1. In iCloud Drive on iCloud.com, click Recently Deleted in the sidebar.
  2. Click Recover All, or select each file you want to recover, then click Recover.
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hey, thanks so much for your reply.

there was nothing in the obsidian folder in my icloud :frowning:

and to your second suggestion, i was really hopeful this would work! but there was nothing in my icloud data recovery folder, nor in my iCloud Drive’s ‘recently deleted’ folder… which is honestly perplexing because they SHOULD be there if they were deleted, since the time window for auto-deletion hasn’t closed yet.

4

I’m sorry to hear that happened. Did you have any other backups?

Or were you iCloud syncing to any other devices that you could disconnect from the internet and potentially find copies before they get removed from that device? I saw something on google that if your iCloud account is nearly full, sometimes things get immediately deleted. (Whether that is trustworthy info or not, I couldn’t say.)

Have you attempted to check Obsidian’s File Recovery plugin? If you open snapshots, you have to search for files, and there may be snapshots there. I don’t personally know if there is a way to bulk restore from there.

I hope you can find something. But either way, I highly recommend keeping backups in the future. Sync tools are not great as full backups. Occasionally, you’ll want to make copies of your data into another location (whether manually, or automatically with some tool. The more the better.)

1 Like
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This happened to me as well. Years of work gone. It happened again today. Really makes me not want to use Obsidian.

I have already disabled syncing Obsidian with iCloud drive.
If I try to move Obsidian out of the iCloud drive folder, a popup says its required by MacOS.
On Obsidian file recovery, why tf do you have to manually type each file name you want to recover? How is anyone supposed to know all of what was lost? Why not let the user browse recoverable files?

Hopefully helpful clues for devs:

  • first time it happened was after I resubscribed to iCloud drive after not using it for a while. The syncing process caused 99% of files to disappear, and weirdly enough the ones that remained had half the words as before.
  • today it was because i tried to open an old Obsidian file that said it was stored in iCloud. When I opened it in textEditor MacOS asked me if I want to keep or delete the file. I pressed keep, it kept that file but deleted all the other notes in the folder.

There is an extension called LocalBackup that saved the other vaults. However, I only just realized you have to specify a backup folder that isn’t the default after install, the default path is still in iCloud.

Pretty please pretty fkn please create native truly local backup. Right now it seems too risky to use Obsidian for anything meaningful.

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