This step isn’t needed because you already said to name the folder that way in step 2.
Good catch! I’ve changed that step to “Delete the problematic folder,” just to keep things tidy in iCloud.
Also, would you mind posting a quick summary here?
Absolutely!
Summary: To get your notes in iCloud to sync with the Obsidian app again, you can try moving your notes into a new folder and deleting the problematic folder. After moving your notes, iCloud should then be able to sync the new folder, and you should have access to your notes in the Obsidian app.
Update: After experiencing the issue with iCloud not syncing again, I’ve found a different way to fix the issue and get Obsidian to open again on the iPhone.
Summary: You need to at least disable and then reenable iCloud on the iPhone. In troubleshooting this issue the second time around, I removed and then reinstalled the Obsidian app on my iPhone, but I’m not exactly sure if this step is necessary.
It’s just a bummer that we have to jump through hoops to make the synchronization work. When I see developers say things like “we have no control over when iCloud decides to download a configuration file” that just sounds like passing the buck to me. Again, when synchronization works quickly and easily with a whole host of other writing and other content apps, but Obsidian has this lag problem, you can’t really blame iCloud. I would actually move over to Obsidian Sync, but I’ve read that it has the same issues sometimes. And if the developers consider this to be someone else’s problem, then I don’t have confidence that they are trying to fix it.
What is going on is that iCloud Drive is removing notes/files from the device. So even if the configuration files are downloaded and the app starts it freezes untill all notes are downloaded and indexed again. For me, it sometimes takes about 1min.
Even though it’s not problem with Obsidian, they could fix it by allowing the app to function without having all notes downloaded and indexed (or move it to a background thread). That would the the easiest fix.
Better option would to be to prevent iCloud from removing files from Obsidian folder, which I believe is not possible to do atm. I’m not an iOS developer so I may be wrong.
Good idea. It would add a another later of complexity, but perhaps the entire vault could be stored locally in the device. It would sync changes with the iCloud vault folder .
That way, the app is always using local files, and pushing and pulling changes through the iCloud vault folder.
After watching Nick Milos nice video on how easy it is to import Evernote files into Obsidian, using the new importer plug-in, I decided to give it a try and imported some 800 files, mainly Evernote clippings from magazine articles.
Big problem now, syncing on icloud. Obsidian became onworkable on iOS.
(Nothing wrong with the importer plug-in, it does a 100% perfect job)
I believe the Obsidian developers don’t have a good perception of how their users live and work.
Obsidian only works with text only or desktop only. But hey, I am not a lone writer, or librarian locked up behind my desk. I am a dynamic person, living in a colourful World, Where text is accompanied by pictures and drawings. (Even medieval monks knew that typography became much more enjoyable when illustrations were added).
This is a wakeup call for Obsidian. There is too much focus on the benefits of markup. People don’t care, when speed benefits are lost in syncing delays.
And by the way, Evernote is still a great app and since they moved to Europe, are adding lots of improvements. Just check it out. Even the free version is good enough for most.
Don’t get tight up in a web of linked text files.
The world has so much more to offer. More dimensions than text only.
Actually I found a solution that worked 100% for me.
The problems started after adding some 800 new notes coming from an export out of Evernote.
iPhone freezes Obsidian and restarts many times and gives messages that it is busy indexing.
Then I disabled the Omnisearch plugin (which is a great search tool, but does a lot of indexing) and that made all problems go away. It works like a charm.
I have to miss Omnisearch until I am ready to spend money on a new iPhone with a lot more memory, but the problem is definitely solved and gone.
I have been having issues with app startup time for this reason as well. It wasn’t always like this, so I figured it must be something with recent changes to my data.
I did a little debugging, trying to isolate the issue. I removed all my vaults from iCloud, and added things back little by little, hard closing the app each time. Then I would open it, let it process and index, then hard close the app and re-open it. I figured at some point the problem would happen again, and I could whittle it down to discover the problematic file or directory.
In my case it was some large non-text files. I think the largest was a zip file that was about 50mb, and I had multiple. I made sure it had the files downloaded first before opening the app, but it was still slow. Removing them made app startup fast again.
I still have a lot images in my vault, but they are all less than 5mb each (most of them much smaller).
I still have hundreds of text files and images in the vault, but getting rid of the larger files that Obsidian won’t be able to handle is what made the app usable to me again.
I started “syncing” via GitHub a month or two ago because iCloud was taking an eternity to download files almost every time I opened the app. Moving to Git sync eliminated that part of the process, making syncing more reliable and startups much faster than with iCloud sync.
However, there is still something inherent to my vault that causes the iOS app to reindex it quite frequently. I haven’t figured out what’s causing that—it could just be that my phone is really old and won’t retain Obsidian in memory.
This is an important thread. I too use Obsidian on iCloud and iOS and have the same problem. I’m convinced by @cjwirth that I’m being slowed down by the volume of attachments—many of them photos and long audio recordings—that don’t fit on my phone and so break the start-up process for Obsidian there. I’m sad about this because I have loved being able to attach things to my notes and don’t want to have to give that great functionality up.
Can there be some way that Obsidian can startup on iOS (or even desktop) without requiring that every file be downloaded locally? Allow it to maintain a directory of everything that’s available in the cloud, but only download what is being “requested” during any given use of the app? Pretty please?!
I was wondering if that might be due to close to limit of my iCloud storage. I have used 198 of 200 GB plan, so I’ve deleted some files and I have 182 out of 200 and it takes 2 minutes for app to open.
What is frustrating is that if I go out of the app for a second and then get back the app is stuck again…
Previously, few weeks ago… It took a second of few to launch…
sorry that I have not used edit option - I got message that that is to late
I have similar issue with my obsidian folder, on one of my Macs I have iCloud disc optimization and I can’t download my vault for my Mac it says check your internet connection
found a big thread on this: The item couldn't be downloaded. Please c… - Apple Community
It’s particular to iCloud Sync. Obsidian needs all files to fully exist on the device for indexing and caching, but iCloud is built to save space by unloading files it thinks are less likely to be needed. So Obsidian has to ask it to redownload everything. On Mac you can tell iCloud to never unload files, but on iPhone and iPad you can’t.
