Repeated "Do you trust the author of this vault" (Obsidian thinks I am opening a vault for the first time, every time)

Help
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Things I have tried

I use two vaults and this happens every time I open either of them. I get a dialog box asking if I trust the author of the vault because Obsidian thinks I am opening them for the first time. This does not happen when I open one of these vaults from another computer.

After I click “Trust author and enable plugins” everything seems to work fine – but something is not working right.

Any suggestions for something to try (or look for?)

I’m using v1.0.0 now, but it was also happening on the previous version.

What I’m trying to do

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If it doesn’t happen on another machine, the problem obviously results from your OS or working environment. Which OS are you using? Did you install any special privacy settings there?

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Both machines are Windows 10. No special privacy settings. Where does Obsidian write down that it has already opened a vault? I could check that file to see if there is anything odd about it. Thanks!

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Does that also happen when you open the sandbox vault?

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Hi, afraid I don’t know how the sandbox vault – how do I try that? (I’ll do some searching and see if I can figure it out)

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There does not appear to be a sandbox vault in the directory where I would have expected it (from what I found on the Internet). I wonder, should I reinstall Obsidian?

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You should find it under obsidian’s help dialogue

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Thanks found it – interesting, after you open it once, it shows up in the vault list.

Sandbox opens fine, no issues. Just tried turning off all the community plugins. Did not fix the problem. Also tried restricted mode. Still had the problem. Turned off all the core plugins and still had the problem.

What else to try?

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Where is your vault located? Does the location differ from the one on your other machine? Are you using any third party sync solutions?

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The two machines do have different paths to the vault. You might be on to something – on the machine with the issue, the vault is in a directory that is synced to onedrive. The machine without the problem is in a directory which is not synced to onedrive.

Is the potential issue the syncing or the different paths?

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I guess the syncing… Try to make a copy of your vault into another (non synced) folder and open that vault - does the problem still occur?

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That did not work. I moved to a non-synced location, opened closed a few times and each time it asked me to trust the author.

By the way, thanks for working with me. Your profile says you are in Dresden, shouldn’t you be going to sleep soon?

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If you’re using a sync tool, this reminds me of a problem I saw people have where Obsidian wouldn’t remember their workspace configuration. Inside their settings folder they had multiple copies of the “workspace” file.

Look inside the hidden YourVault/.obsidian folder.

Look around for any conflicted files. Files that have an extra number, or brackets like (merge conflicted 2022-10-20) at the end of the name. If so, Obsidian might be having trouble saving your settings. Deleting those conflicted files (backup first :fire:) might fix the problem.

The reason moving it out of sync wouldn’t automatically fix the problem is that those files might still be there. They would need to be cleared first. (Assuming that is the issue.)

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:face_with_peeking_eye:

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Sadly, that isn’t it – no obviously corrupted files in the .obsidian directory. There is a “workspace” file and a workslpace.json file. Ah, but there is a clue.

On the machine which works correctly, the workspace file was last modified today, but on the one which isn’t working, it was last modified on October 5th. Could that be a clue? What is stored in that file?

I’m going to try an experiment and delete it (I have a backup) and see if it is the sort of file that is recreated. Result - the file is not recreated and the problem did not go away.

Ok, tried an experiment that worked. I created a new copy of the vault from the remote sync. This appears to be ok. I’ll do it for the other vault and check that too. I still have the (presumably) corrupted copy of the vault in case there is something else to check.

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For plugins, I don’t think the workspace settings will be relevant. It just reminded me of the problem where people kept losing their layouts.

I thought it was ordinary to have both a “workspace” and “workspace.json”. But I just noticed I also have a “workspaces.json” which hasn’t been modified since 2021-11-17. So I guess that is a leftover from an older version.

I’m not sure where your troublesome setting is stored. It might also be stored somewhere in the global app settings. But again, backup first.

Win: %appdata%/obsidian/
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/
Linux: ~/.config/obsidian/
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I’m back to working ok (as above the experiment of restoring a fresh copy of the vault from sync worked). So, there would seem to be something messed up about the previous local copies of the vaults, but I don’t know what to look for and have less motivation to look since the new local copies seem to be working fine.

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I spoke to early. The problem came back.

Then I decided to wipe everything obsidian from the machine, reinstall, resync and start over.

This is windows – I did the uninstall, reinstalled and was a bit surprised that I was automatically logged in after the reinstall. (and still had the problem). I uninstalled again and discovered that there were still obsidian folders in “appdata.” This time I manually deleted those files and reinstalled again.

Then, as expected, I needed to login again. After syncing, this time it seems to be working. So now I suspect there was something corrupted in the appdata folders.

Of course I have no idea what was corrupted, but I think the most actionable suggestion is that an uninstall should delete those folders.

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