Settings aren't being saved

[Persephone]

I’ve searched and I’m surprised that no one seems to have the same issue as me.

Steps to reproduce

Open Obsidian. Change some settings. Close and open Obsidian again.

Expected result

I expect changes to settings to be saved so that if I re-open Obsidian it has the same settings as when I closed it.

Actual result

Settings don’t get saved anymore. I make some changes (for example disabling plugins, changing the default location for new notes), but then when I close Obsidian and re-open it I revert right back to the previous settings. Whilst Obsidian was open and I had already made some changes to settings, I checked out the files in .obsidian. None of the changes were reflected in any of the files. Additionally, I noticed that in the workspace file, the lastOpenFile hadn’t updated since April 5th (based on my daily notes in there). I can add and delete plugins, but I can’t activate them or deactivate them.

Environment

• Operating system: Windows 10
• Obsidian version: v0.11.13 (uninstalled all plugins, same result)

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Additional information

My vault is located on a mapped network drive

[blippybloopy]

v0.11.13 has been working perfectly fine for me. To double check I just now changed some settings, closed Obsidian, and opened it again. All the changes I had made to the settings were still there.

[WhiteNoise]

I can’t repro this.

• Do you see errors in console ctrl-shift-i?
• Does it happen if you keep your files locally?
• Does it happen if you create another vault in the network drive?
• Are you sure Obsidian has write access to the .obsidian folder?

[Persephone]

Thanks for the quick responses!

@WhiteNoise pointed me to the culprit - the .obsidian folder is on read only:

I have no idea how that happened. I did set the folders to hidden a while back because I didn’t want to keep seeing them, but didn’t touch the read-only checkbox.

Strangely even when I remove the write protection it keeps reverting back to read only.

I’ll keep exploring what’s causing this and will post again when I’ve figured it out.

Edit: turns out things were a bit more complicated than that. Every single folder on my local machine and shares had that filled out read-only attribute box. Seems to be some sort of Windows bug that doesn’t actually affect whether a folder can or can’t be written to.

What happened is that I had hidden the .obsidian folder at one point using the Windows attributes. But because that folder is on an UNRAID network drive it seems that the permissions got messed up and even though I un-hid it again later using the Windows dialogue, it didn’t restore the permissions. So after the permissions were changed using chmod -R 777 everything is working perfectly again.