Steps to reproduce
- Create a large text file–perhaps 500 KB to 1 MB in size.
- Use Obsidian Sync.
- Make edits over time. Perhaps add a few paragraphs at the end, or edit the document for clarity.
(With casual usage, this may take a few weeks to cause the bug.)
Did you follow the troubleshooting guide?
Yes.
Expected result
The file is backed up at regular intervals and synced between devices.
Actual result
Your Sync vault is suddenly full, from working on a file under 1 MB in size! And a full vault stops syncing.
Looking at the version history, I have many hundreds of saved versions of my document–sometimes dozens from a single writing session. It appears that every time a few words or phrases are changed, the entire document is backed up, again and again, rather than just saving a small record of the changes made.
At the moment, vault’s current storage takes up about 14 MB on my disk, but it uses a full Gigabyte in my remote Vault, as some files are duplicated hundreds of times.
This combination of version history entries being both very frequent and complete file backups makes Obsidian Sync unusable with text/code files larger than about 100 KB, depending on how often you work in them.
Workarounds
- Turn off Obsidian Sync periodically to let the Version History clear itself out
- Delete and recreate your remote Vault every few weeks
- Disable plugins that frequently alter large configuration or text files
- Push the Purge button over and over and see if it does anything (usually not)
- Do NOT get larger storage! It doesn’t help, because it expands your version history to a whole year and makes the problem even worse.
- Use a different cloud service with a plugin to coordinate it
Environment
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: 1.12.7
Installer version: 1.8.10
Operating system: Windows 11 Home 10.0.26200
Login status: logged in
Language: en
Catalyst license: none
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 1
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 17
Plugins enabled: 7
1: Unicode Search v0.5.0
2: Dataview v0.5.68
3: Quiet Outline v0.4.3
4: Cursor Jump v0.1.9
5: Better Word Count v0.10.1
6: Custom list character v1.1.0
7: Outliner v4.9.0
Additional information
Many different people have brought up this issue in the forums as a Help question, or have given Feature Requests that could help. Some of these are listed here: Enable the purge process to also remove old versions of notes and other files - #8 by shefakhoda .
But I suspect that version history duplicating entire files hundreds of times over is probably not how Obsidian Sync was intended to function, and as such I file this as a bug report.