Sync Mac<->iOs unreliable - notes duplicated etc

Bug graveyard
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1

Sync is completely unreliable and unusable

Yesterday I had a lot of problems with syncing my large vault from Mac to IOS while doing massive updates on the Mac vault (moving hundreds of notes from folder to folder, etc…), so I concluded that it was too many updates for the sync process to keep-up.

Today I decided to start fresh. My Mac Vault (approx 5000 notes) is stable. Here is the scenario:

  • I deleted the IOS app, reinstalled and restarted a new sync.
  • The IOS sync takes a lot of time (3 hours… ) because every few minutes the IOS apps has to be manually resurrected, which is quite a pain for hours…
  • In the meantime, I work on my Mac vault … a little. I updated maybe 20/30 notes, added a few. Not much.
  • I closed my Mac (after checking that the Mac sync was fully done too).
  • In the meantime, I DO NOT TOUCH my IOS Obsidian Vault. I just resurrect the app, so the sync process works. I do not add/update/delete anything on IOS during the sync.
  • One hour later that IOS sync is finished. “fully synced”. No error. But I noticed that my daily page seemed strange.
  • I checked on the Mac and :scream: I noticed that MANY of my notes on the Mac now have duplicated content. The same content twice… Some notes (those which I was working on, I guess) with a slightly different version, but also many notes that I did not update this morning have the same exact content twice.

Now I am going to waste hours to manually correct all those mess-up notes :exploding_head:

I concluded that, even if I paid for it, Obsidian Sync is much too unreliable and dangerous to use right now. I cannot let Sync mess up some of my 5000 notes randomly. I can’t just “revert to backup” because I don’t know when and how some notes are messed-up amongst 5000 so it’s unpractical.

Obsidian 0.13.15 MacOS 12.0.1
Obsidian 1.05 IOS 15.1.1

2

I am lucky, I have the Vault Change Log plugin activated for the last 50 notes changed and apparently Sync messed-up … 48 notes, So I could identify which ones.

I could not find any pattern why those specific 48 notes were messed-up. 3/4th of them I was not working on them at all this norming so why those specific notes I don’t know.

3

If we assume iCloud is nowhere near your vaults, this suggests that there’s some other process that changes the file so that Sync believes it has changed when it hasn’t been edited by you.

4

Did you create a new remove vault too? Can you attach the sync logs?

Can you provide a series of steps to reliably reproduce a problem?

5

Nop. No iCloud and as far as I know I don’t see anything else running on my Mac touching those files.

6

Indeed I did not deleted the Vault on the Sync server itself. That’s maybe where the problems comes from…

7

Now the vault is deleted and the sync turned off. Can I still find the logs from yesterday somewhere or are they gone too ?

8

But even if they were some older version of the notes still on the sync server from the day before, why would Sync duplicated the content of some notes (and only some…) ?

Is there a “normal” sync use case when the content of a specific note get concatenated with the content of a previous version during sync ?

9

The “duplication” effect can happen if the merge algorithm thinks there are two independently modified and unsynchronized changes.

1 Like
10

Ok, I will make another try after a full backup with resting everything to new. on both the Sync server and the iPhone…