Hi everyone,
I’m hoping someone might have an idea for recovering an Obsidian vault that has completely disappeared from my iPad.
I used Obsidian on my iPad for work and had a vault containing a large number of notes and folders. I hadn’t opened Obsidian for a few weeks, and when I opened the app again, my vault was gone. Obsidian now shows the initial setup screen asking me to create/open a vault or use Obsidian Sync.
I unfortunately don’t remember exactly how I originally set up the vault. I don’t think I ever subscribed to Obsidian Sync, so I assume the vault was stored locally on the iPad. I may have updated Obsidian/iPadOS in the meantime, but I can’t say whether that is related.
Important: I have never deleted/reinstalled or offloaded the Obsidian app.
Here is what I have checked/tried so far:
- Checked the iPad Files app under both “On My iPad” and iCloud Drive – no Obsidian folder or vault is present.
- Searched the Files app for known note/folder names and
.mdfiles – nothing. - Checked Recently Deleted – nothing relevant.
- iCloud shows only 43 bytes of data associated with Obsidian, so the vault does not appear to be stored there.
- There are unfortunately no older iCloud device backups.
- Under Settings → General → iPad Storage → Obsidian, iPadOS still reports approximately 12.1 MB of “Documents & Data.”
- I connected the iPad to a Windows PC using Apple Devices. Obsidian appears under File Sharing, but its shared files area is empty.
- I created a full encrypted local backup of the iPad on the PC.
- I opened that backup using iMazing and inspected the Obsidian app container.
- The Obsidian Documents folder is empty.
Library/Preferencesstill containsmd.obsidian.plist(only about 266 bytes).- I also checked
Library/WebKit/WebsiteData, including LocalStorage and IndexedDB, but both were empty. - I exported the entire decrypted iPad backup to a folder and searched the whole backup for
*.md, known folder names, and other recognizable terms from the vault. No relevant files were found.
At this point I’m mainly wondering whether there is any location on iPadOS where the original vault could still exist that I haven’t checked, particularly considering that the Obsidian app has never been deleted and iPadOS still reports about 12.1 MB of Documents & Data.
Is there anything else I could inspect in the app container, the encrypted/local iPad backup, or elsewhere on iPadOS? Could the vault exist somewhere that would not be included in the Obsidian Documents directory or in the device backup?
I’m trying not to modify/reset/reinstall Obsidian until I’m certain there is no remaining recovery option.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. The vault contained a lot of work-related notes, so I’d really like to exhaust every possible recovery option before giving up.
Thank you!