Whole vault cleared out for no reason

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I do not know if this is bug or not, but this happend twice, this recent time I lost all my notes for last semester.
Obsidian seems to have deleted all my files for no reason, its not like I clicked wrong vault and cant find my notes. It literally delete my vault when I am still using.
1st time I realise it was deleted is because I suddenly found out some of my custom keybind like toggle bullet point does not respond anymore while editing. Then I close obsidian and restarted it the theme returned to default one, turns out notes, themes, community plugins are all gone. Luckily I had a backup around that time, so I just opened backup, and kept using it.
2nd time(this time), similar thing happend, except I realise after the next startup, all gone, just some image and a single page with a long string that looks like a hash(which I dont remember if I put that there or not). I managed to recover some of it using disk recovery tool, and some recent ones using file recovery, but most are gone.

Things I have tried

I do not know who’s responsible for this kind of thing. If it is from Obsidian itself, then please fix this. If this is from community plugin, then perhaps plugins shouldnt be allowed to delete files, except by request to Obsidian itself and ask for my permission. If it is due to me having some setting not set right/malpractice, then please lemme know. I truely feel Obsidian is a great software and I loved using it, but I really need the note to be kept safe. Also I dont have obsidian sync, it has been running locally.

2
  • did you check your vault on hard drive ?
  • did you set up Obsidians default backup system ?
  • did you set up another backup system ?
  • are you sharing your computer with other people who can access your home directory as well ?

You really need to setup some backup system, maybe not daily but weekly

On mac scheduled backups are available out of the box with TimeMachine. On Linux you can choose various applications to backup system and user data.
On Windows i don’t know but I’m sure you will find even free backup solutions.

3

Seem like your vault is in a folder used by OneDrive or DropBox?
I’ve seen at least 3-4 similar threads in the last 2 months about issues arising from this.
In at least 1-2 of them helpers pointed out what one can do.

4

Yes I do have backup now, I thought the default recovery was enough, guess I was naive.
Regarding your questions:

  1. Yes I did check on hard drive it was wiped clean, not even in trash.
  2. If you are referring to Obsidian sync I did not purchase that.
  3. Nope.
  4. Nay.
5

Actually its not, its on a sd card on my laptop

6

Was your vault on a hard drive or SD Card, then?

I don’t think putting a vault on an SD Card is good practice.

7

Ok, last one, maybe more helpful to learn why this has happened again.

Maybe your sd card isn’t of good quality, in the past i lost some data myself because of bad sd cards.

8

Can you enter your vault and check the File Recovery option?

9

I was on my SD card.
Perhaps you are right, vault may not belong to an SD card. Although still doesnt explain why only data in obsidian folder disappears there are other folders in SD as well.

10

Interestingly, this happend on two SD card, the ‘backup’ I used after the first time I encountered this problem, is on a separate SD card, first one was from SanDIsk, Second one is Samsung, both purchased from Amazon. I doubt it is because of SD corruption.

11

Yes, already did, unfortunately only recovered some of the recent md files

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