Panic - two copies of my vault

After a massive number of earlier iCloud syncing problems I see two copies of my vault and I don’t which one to trust.

MacOS 12.0.1

I think the screen shot says it all.

Which of these is my real vault and which one should I delete?

  • Mark

I’m not sure, but I’ll reply now just to try to help.

From what I remember, you can’t use the main “Obsidian” app folder as a vault in iCloud. You’d rather want to have your vault located inside that folder.

/Obsidian/MyVault/
not:
/Obsidian/

It looks like you named your vault “Obsidian”. And so when you went to upload to iCloud, I guess it automatically used the Obsidian app folder as the vault location.

I might be wrong about that though.

And I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know how to know which is the correct version. But I do suggest you not name your vault “Obsidian”.

@romebot you were having trouble in this thread: Obsidian iOS: multiple folders = multitple vaults?

I wonder if it is same cause? I noticed you have the same vault name as “Obsidian”. And I am wonder if this is causing weird conflicts? (But I don’t know!)

Thank you for taking the time to answer on Christmas Day.

The vault is named MarkPKM. When I was first setting it up, I set it inside a folder named Obsidian and apparently somehow that got duplicated. Honestly I think that is a red herring.

Rather than try to sort it, step by step instructions for creating a new iCloud vault from scratch might be easier. I can always add the notes with a copy and paste.

If this happened to me, I would stop sync, and stop Obsidian, then use Beyond Compare to compare the two instances of the vault to confirm which set of data I would want to be the vault of record. You can get a trial of BC, so no need to purchase it just for this.

The vault is named MarkPKM

Oh yeah I now see that in the top, pardon! But in the bottom, it looks like your .obsidian is inside the Obsidian folder directly. Yes, perhaps a red herring, but maybe a symptom of whatever went wrong.

In the end I did a rename of the vault via iOS and it turned out the one under iCloud Drive was the odd one out.

FWIW From a personal perspective, I think that the MacOS use of the iCloud drive needs to be more streamlined, It’s should ask me to navigate a folder to select a vault. Like iOS it should present me with a list of folders stored in the iCloud.

There also needs to documentation on handling vaults when iCloud gets stuck.

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