Remotely Save: Can i rescue my situation by just

[etyrnal]

Question: can i recover from this problem (will describe) by temporarily setting Sync Direction on the mobile android device to be “Incremental Pull and Delete” to save my butt?

Problem: Android device Obsidian unexpectedly quits when i try to remotely save.

Environment / situation / normal usage:

I use Obsidian on “2.5” devices. One installation on android phone where i make 99% of new notes & edits. Another installation on a linux desktop – because it’s easier to make mass-edits/fixes/changes there. And the .5 is my nextcloud DAV server (which works great). I never run the desktop or the android Obsidian at the same time. I use Remotely Save to sync/backup.

What happened: So last night i closed obsidian on the phone. Opened obsidian on the desktop and did massive editing. Moved hundreds of notes (600+) with many cross-links using linux obsidian desktop Obsidian interface to do it. Renamed/merged/deleted duplicate notes ending in " 1". Again, phone app not open – so no Remotely Save operations clashing with the desktop.

When finished editing etc. The desktop was perfectly happy. Remote Saved it. Everything happy on desktop and Remotely Save. Now, on the phone Obsidian, since i knew this was going to be a massive change for Remotely Save to deal with, i changed the Remotely Save settings to “Incremental Pull and Delete”, hoping it would look at the fixed up tuned up database on the DAV server as being the ‘master’ temporarily – thinking it would sync all edited notes, pull down any new notes/media files, and delete anything locally on the phone that was no longer there on the tuned up DAV copy of the Obsidian vault.

But now Obsidian on the mobile device keeps crashing when Remotely Save tries to run, and i suspect it’s maybe due to some sort of N-way comparison out of memory thing?

To try to recover, Can i just delete the local Obsidian vault folder (or maybe just the notes in it) on the android device’s local file system, and start the phone’s obsidian back up, and it will just pull everything down from the happy webdav copy? Then if/when it succeeds, set the Sync Direction back to the normal Bidirectional?

[Yurcee]

Make a copy of your vault on Linux for a backup and fiddle away.
If you make many mass scale changes on PC and suspect this plugin (never used it) hangs with memory overflow issues, just ditch it and consider yourself wiser.

Use git with a terminal (not the Git plugin). Huge changes involving thousands of files take a few seconds to pull down.

[etyrnal]

thank you for your well intentioned remarks. while not directly answering the question I do appreciate the added insights. but I needed a solution rather than wanting to walk away.

I have 600 interrelated notes that I don’t want to just break.

the good news is this. on the Android device I renamed the folder that has the obsidian vault in it. I recreated and empty copy of that folder. and I told the plug-in remotely save to change its save direction so that it pulled remote files to local and deleted any files in the local that didn’t exist on the remote.

I ran it this way and it pulled all of the notes and PDFs and images and media files down and essentially recreated the remote copy of the vault that lives on the web dev server locally. then I ran it another couple of times to make sure it saw no differences. and then I changed the direction of copy in the plug-in so that it would save from locally to remote and

[Yurcee]

Well, some roads are meant to be travelled alone. We volunteers can only do so much.
This directional change business sounds messy, if you ask me…
But git also has a learning curve, granted.