Hello everyone. Today, while I was working on a note and had other notes opened on the side, several of them suddenly turned into blank pages. This is scary…
I am using a MacBook Air M1 and syncing notes with iCloud (the folder is on my desktop).
Things I have tried
I tried opening the md files from the folder outside of obsidian, but they are blank.
It is really hard to guess what’s going on without a lot more information. Do you have any plugins enabled? Are there other apps or services using these files? What were you doing exactly when happened?
The File Recovery core plugin should be enabled by default. You can check the snapshots in Settings > Plugin Options > File Recovery, maybe they’re there
Thanks for all your replies. I was able to recover the 2 notes thanks to the file recovery plugin! I really don’t understand what has happened, it’s the first time (hopefully the last one as well…). I suspect that it might have something to do with the fact that I sync the folder with Ulysses as well (as external folder). That’s the only thing coming to my mind…
I have a bunch of plugins active, but nothing that seems to or should be interfering.
Thanks again…
I’m not using an M1 Mac but I don’t think that’s related. My guess and suspicion more and more is that this is a weird iCloud Drive issue. I’m curious if we can get a few more data points from others who’ve hit this blank files issue as to whether they’re also storing their vaults on iCloud.
I am wondering if there’s a tool I can run that will watch a set of files in a very tight loop and quickly pop up an alert if a file gets modified or zeroed by an outside process. Almost like a customized version of an antivirus app.
update Nov 2021: Just want to note that I no longer think this is an iCloud issue, as I moved away from storing my vault on iCloud a long time ago, and am still consistently hitting this data loss issue. It remains a big thorn in my side.
I store my vaults in git and do a nightly triage of my changes. It’s caught a number of issues (mostly caused by me T.B.H.) early enough for me to fix. Obviously no automatic popup though…