Opening files makes a duplicate

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I have a folder locally (Google Drive) where I’m working on files that are shared with other users. I made multiple changes to an MD file after dragging the file to Obsidian, but the other people were not seeing the updates on their side.

I found out that it was duplicating the files to my Vault which is NOT what I want.

Things I have tried

I changed the setting in Files and Links for Default location for new Attachments to Same folder as current file, but that does not seem to have changed anything.

I did search the forum, but didn’t find anything that aligned with this, apologies if I missed it but I really need to know how to stop this behaviour when I’m opening existing files outside my Vault.

2

This is not a current feature that Obsidian has, it only works with vaults, and cannot edit files outside of a vault. So it is expected behavior that when you drag a note into Obsidian from outside a vault, it makes a copy of that note in the vault.

It’s on the roadmap to “Open individual Markdown files” which is what you’re looking for. There is likely an existing feature request for this already.