What I’m trying to do
Sync reliably across 2 Windows machines and 2 Android devices without my note data being corrupted.
Things I have tried
- Searched help docs & forum
- Learned closing Obsidian can cause sync problems; stopped closing it as often and started waiting for the green checkmark before closing (Finish syncing even if window/app is closed)
- Ensured no vault is stored on any 3rd party sync service such as Dropbox or OneDrive
- Rebuilt all vaults from scratch on all systems
- Verified line endings match on disk on all systems (they’re all Unix-style)
- Ensured git backup is only installed/running on 1 system
- Increased my git backup interval to every 5 minutes to try to limit the scope of the corruption
Description
I’m using Obsidian every day, across 2 Windows 11 systems and two Android devices. It works fine some of the time, but I keep having problems where I will use Obsidian on one device, and then go to the other device and discover my notes are corrupted. The corruption looks like:
- Notes entirely missing
- Notes that were moved are now in both locations
- Folders that were renamed are now duplicated, with some of the notes missing from the duplicated folder and some still there
- Two lines concatenated together, such that the second line overwrites part of the first line, like:
- Expected:
- Line 1 content
- Line 2 content
- Actual:
- Line 1 cLine 2 content
- Expected:
- Lines missing
- Lines duplicated
- References to other notes are corrupted and no longer work, e.g.:
- Expected:
- [[Path/To/File|Link name]]
- Actual:
- [[Link nPath/To/F[[File]]To/File|Link name
- Expected:
- Files that have no local changes are uploaded when remote changes should have been downloaded, erasing the remote changes
- In one example, in the sync history, the file was uncorrupted before being moved, and after being moved on one system, on the other system it contains some line-wise corruption. The only operation I did was move it, I didn’t make any edits.
Renaming or moving folders seems to really exacerbate the problem. I’m less likely to see major, structural corruption if I don’t reorganize things. But I do still see line-wise corruption.
When I check the sync log, it almost never says there was a conflict. I’ve seen it say it had a conflict once or twice, and the conflict was resolved appropriately in those cases.
I’m paying for Sync and I would really like for it to work correctly. I tried some other non-Sync solutions and they weren’t nearly as clean/seamless as sync is supposed to be.