I ran the Obsidian 1.4.16 upgrade yesterday. When I opened Obsidian today, my files were gone. I’m a newer Obsidian user and have a few months worth of creative work in those files. I wasn’t using sync. I hadn’t done a backup.
I wasn’t using the sandbox vault. I had created my vault in my user’s directory. I didn’t think I’d created it inside OneDrive, but here’s what I see today:
In Obsidian: When I go to switch vaults, I see two vaults. One I think I may have created today when I was frantically clicking around. It’s a blur. The other appears to point toward where my vault was yesterday.
In Windows Explorer search results:
- Obsidian files with today’s date in \Users[username]\Appdata
- An Obsidian vault with today’s date at “C:\Users[username]\OneDrive\Documents\Obsidian Vault.obsidian.obsidian”
- This folder with yesterday’s date: “C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Obsidian”
- A shortcut to my previous vault: “C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\Ann’s Obsidian.lnk”
When I search for .md file names, I find shortcuts like these that no longer work:
“C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\The Mothers Are On Parade.md.lnk” and “C:\Users[username]\Recent\The Mothers Are On Parade.md.lnk”
I did not have File History turned on for this laptop. OneDrive throws the error “Graph error. Item needs to be unlocked. Access denied” when I try to restore OneDrive to the point before the Obsidian upgrade was applied.
None of the missing files appear in either the Recycle Bin or the OneDrive Recycle Bin.
Is there anything else I can try? Do I grieve and move on? What the heck happened here? I really don’t understand why the files would have gone away. For other users who may be in the same boat, what lessons besides back up and for real, back up, and maybe don’t do anything inside OneDrive?
Many thanks for the patience of those who have seen similar before.