Trouble with icloud on windows

Help
1

I’ve been using Obsidian across my windows pc / mac / iphone for probably a couple of years or so without serious problems.

Recently however I have been having issues creating and editing notes on obsidian in windows (10).

icloud now seems to enjoy creating a lot of duplicate notes. This is very annoying, because I end up with ‘note, note (1), note (2)’ etc being saved to the vault.

More importantly however, icloud seems to create a conflict every time it creates a new note, and a few words or lines of text that I have just written will be deleted, and an error message will appear in the top right of the obsidian window, saying something like ‘this file was edited elsewhere’. This is makes the application on windows essentially unusable.

I’ve had a look for solutions, and noted that a couple of years ago users struggling with duplicate files on windows recommended switching from the microsoft store version of icloud to a version hosted directly by apple. Unfortunately apple no longer hosts this version.

Has anybody else encountered this issue?

1 Like
2

Enough people have encountered issues with duplication in iCloud on Windows over Obsidian’s existence that the Help page warns about it:

Recommended systems : macOS , iOS , iPadOS

… iCloud Drive on Windows may lead to file duplication or corruption.

(Sync your notes across devices - Obsidian Help)

I’m under the impression that Windows problems decreased when the option to keep files downloaded was added, but I think I also heard recently that the Windows version of iCloud either lost or never had that feature.

I have seen reports like yours in the past, where someone used iCloud on Windows with Obsidian for some time with no trouble, and then one day the troubles started.

3

Can Obsidian fix this? I have this issue consistently on Windows, no matter what settings I have changed.

4

I don’t think there’s much Obsidian can do about it.