Vault suddenly disappeared

Help
1

Hey everyone, I’ve been using Obsidian since the beginning of the year with no problem and have been accessing my vault almost daily. However, when I opened the app today, my vault was gone. It’s like it never existed, only the sandbox was available and I couldn’t access anything under the file recovery tab. Thankfully I was able to recover my notes after searching for “.md” in my computer’s files. I see other people have posted similar issues with their vaults suddenly disappearing and was wondering how something like this even happens. I haven’t updated my OS or the Obsidian app recently, the only thing I can think of is that I recently renamed my vault but the disappearance happened well over a week after that. Any tips to avoid this in the future? I use Obsidian for my college notes, and I would REALLY appreciate not having to go through this again.

What I’m trying to do

Figure out how to avoid vault deletion in the future, if possible

Things I have tried

Made copies of .md files and stored them locally. I’m using a MacOS so they should sync to iCloud as well.

Thanks in advance!

2

What Obsidian as a software does is simply open an existing folder, add some config on a hidden folder (.obsidian) and parse the files inside.

So, some questions for more context:

  1. What is the location of your vault that has dissapeared?
  2. Is it possible it is on an external drive you maybe removed?
  3. Is it possible that the drive where you have the vault has been corrupted, or the folder has moved?

It should not dissapear, that would imply a huge error on Obsidian (which is not likely) or a problem with your drive and/or folder structure.

Hope this helps.

3

Is there a chance you renamed the vault but kept Obsidian open for that week? It’s possible it didn’t disappear from the open vaults until you closed and reopened Obsidian.

Did you rename the folder from Finder, or from Obsidian?

4

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.