When I add a note to a page before it has synced, everything on that page gets deleted on the other devices

Steps to reproduce

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

  1. Open up Obsidian on an unsynced device, like a phone
  2. Add something to a note, like for instance a daily note
  3. Sync device later
  4. Every other device deletes whatever was on that note already, and instead only shows what I included back on step 1.
  5. I can’t get back the note because its not “deleted” so its not available in bulk restore.
  6. The OLD version of the note has to be found in the revision history. Madness ensues.

This is problematic because I use Obsidian as a journal. Sometimes its not open and doesn’t finish syncing before I add something. Losing items WITHIN a note is especially difficult to fix, even more so than scrolling through everything in bulk restore.

Expected result

The expected result is that once everything is synced, the information that I added to the note is just appended to the bottom of the note.

Actual result

The original notes lose all their information, overwritten by the unsynced version of the mostly empty note.

Environment

Windows
iPad
Android Phone


Additional information

This diff shows what happens:

I am a bit confused by this report.

How can you add something if Obsidian is not open?

With sync, you have the sync-specific version history, have you looked there?

Could you kindly provide screenshots of the sync logs from two devices when this behavior happens?

Thanks

Sure, sorry for the confusing wording.

When I use Obsidian on two different devices—let’s call them “device A” and “device B”—the syncing process can create issues. If device B has had Obsidian open for some time and I then open Obsidian on device A, it may take a while for device A to fully sync with device B. During this syncing period, I might start adding new notes on device A.

The problem arises when a note that appears empty on device A finally syncs. Instead of combining the content from both devices, the sync process overwrites whatever I’ve added on device A with the content from device B. This issue is particularly noticeable with daily notes, where I’m frequently updating the same note throughout the day.

Windows Log:

Android Log:
The sync log from that same time is no longer appearing.

I am still a bit confused. Are you describing this or something else?

We are aware of another recent problem with sync that we fixed in 1.4.14. Let me know if your issues are solved when you get it.

Yeah @WhiteNoise , pretty close, except I am experience a different type of this problem. Obsidian deletes the content of the remote note, instead replacing it with the new sync’d local note.

So I’ll need to manually merge the two later using “retrieve history”. This seems to be a bug, because the expected outcome would be to append information to my daily notes, rather delete information.

If it happens again can you kindly provide the logs from the mobile side? Thanks

Hi, following back on this.

I kept forgetting to grab the logs from my mobile device, so I just ended up turning off “Open daily note on startup” on all my devices, and I’m just careful not to open a daily note until the device syncs.

Maybe I’ll check back every so often to see if the bug is eventually fixed. Thanks for trying to help though!

(Incidentally I also turned off the ‘Text Extractor’ plugin because it would create so many .json files that syncing was slowing down. That didn’t really fix anything, but it was something that might be tangentially related.)