Obsidian won't open

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1

What I’m trying to do

I’m on Tahoe 26.2
Obsidian just won’t open.
Obsidian won’t open my current vault. Or any of my old vaults. The data is all intact.
I installed the newest version of the app, emptying the community folder and various other steps.

It would be a big step if I could at least get the app open. Something that might be important is that if I click “show recents” on the Obsidian icon. a wide row of vaults I’ve tried to open displays across the bottom of the screen. I can’t delete them. If I double click them they try unsuccessfully to open in Obsidian.
So please, I’d welcome some advice on how to launch Obsidian.

Things I have tried

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Method 2: Manual Disabling (If the app crashes on start)

If Obsidian crashes before you can access settings, you must disable them externally:

  1. Close Obsidian.
  2. Navigate to your Obsidian vault folder on your computer.
  3. Open the hidden .obsidian folder (you may need to enable “Show Hidden Files” in your operating system).
  4. Find the file named community-plugins.json and delete or rename it (e.g., community-plugins.json.bak).
  5. Restart Obsidian. All community plugins will now be disabled.

EDIT –
I assume you tried rebooting.

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When is the last time you downloaded and reinstalled Obsidian? The installer might be too old. That might help.

4

I’m sorry to say I removed the community plugins json file and it didn’t work. For what it’s worth I was lucky enough to have a duplicate backup of the same vault and it did’t work there either. I went through something like this a few years ago and one of the upshots was that plugins which reached outside of Obsidian to download data were most likely to cause problems. I have some embedded web page but I also was running Raindrop.io and I believe that would involve downloading data. I did a search for files with Raindrop in the name and content, but that didn’t help. It seems like there’s got to be a way to just at least load Obsidian to a place where I could choose a vault, or make a new empty vault

5

you should make sure your data is safe.

once it is.

I would uninstall Obsidian completely. Re-install.

see what happens from there.

6

I download a new copy of the Obsidian app a few days ago

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Uninstalled Obsidian with CleanMyMac, then opened recent Obsidian dmg, and it worked. (At least so far.) All the notes I’d had opened before are open. Onward and upward!

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