When creating workspace that have several documents open, Obsidian has an absolute fit and cannot seem to hang onto documents I added to a workspace. This is pretty inconvenient as I’m trying to make ttrpg character sheets and I use the same vault for multiple campaigns - ideally, I’d like to use different workspaces for different characters/needs of this particular vault.
Sometimes its 2 documents that fail to load, sometimes its more, it’s not always clear what it is and isn’t going to save.
Sorry, forgot to mention. MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1, and I do have Sync set up on this, but I don’t actively use sync in my day to day, and haven’t updated my vaults in those locations in a number of weeks. It’s connected to an iPad and iPhone though.
I’m not sure what that means. Does it mean there is no syncing happening at all, as in it is turned off? Or you just don’t sync both ways? The important thing to figure out is what the files are doing here.
In any case, there are a couple things to check:
Are you absolutely 100% sure you aren’t also storing your vault in a folder that is backed up by iCloud, or any other sync tool? The sync tools might be fighting each other.
If you go into your vault/.obsidian folder, do you see any conflicted or copied files, especially workspace.json and workspaces.json? It might indicate those files got duplicated by a tool and Obsidian is having trouble writing to the files to save your settings.
And back to the first point, if you are accidentally storing in iCloud (or other), then iCloud might be offloading some of your documents into the cloud, which would appear to Obsidian as deleting, or unable to read.
Sync is turned on, but I’ve not opened Obsidian on any device but my desktop in weeks. I also made these documents the day I noticed the problem occurring, which was a few days ago.
I am 100% certain that I’m not using iCloud/Dropbox/Drive - I am obsessive about managing my data and aside from Backblaze which backs up my ENTIRE computer, there shouldn’t be any weird file syncing in this vault. All the files are still there, they just don’t save to the workspace.
I do see both a workspace.json and a workspaces.json file in my .obsidian folder, but only one copy of each. Are those two conflicting with each other?
you only get to have one workspace.json and one workspaces.json file each config folder
workspace is the currently loaded one
workspaces is the one holding the various saved workspaces
so if you load workspace B and quit obsidian, next time you will be loaded with it in your workspace.json
as for files not appearing on workspaces…hmmm, it can happen to one active file on startup, until some indexing is going on but in the end the file gets shown…
difficult to say from here…
can your press CMD+SHIFT+I to check the console if there anything else or at least identify the files not opening… something to check in the meantime…
I guess I’m likely jumping to conclusions with “workspaces” only because you used the word. But for example, I see that exact same error if I delete an open file from Finder, and it disappears from Obsidian. This might just be a file issue, not a workspace issue.
But in general, if you see any duplicated or conflicted settings files, it might be a clue.
If you get the error, and the file disappears, is the file still safe and intact in Finder? Is there any evidence the file has been written or changed (modified date for example) after the glitch happens, even if you didn’t modify the note yourself?
How big is the vault? How many files? Is your hard drive almost full, or anything like that? (I’m just grasping at straws!)
If you were to do a test, and copy the entire vault, but delete the .obsidian folder in the copied vault, would that new vault cause the problem too? (I’m suggesting to test with all plugins and settings completely reset, and see if it actually is something to do with being hefty, without the inconvenience of changing your current vault.)
+1 to finding sneaky warnings/errors in the Developer Console.
Ah hah, so, I duplicated the vault via @rigmarole’s suggestion and gave the workspace a try, and everything came up clean and working. On a hunch I tested a few new plugins on this new vault and narrowed down the culprit.
I was using this plugin to get the column view in a few of the documents (not all of the ones that were disappearing, which makes the situation weirder), and as soon as I put it on the clean vault with no other 3rd party plugins running the problem appeared again. Strange how this plugin isn’t playing nice with workspaces, I’ll leave a comment on the Issues tab on github.
Thanks for helping me track down the problem! The troubleshooting helped a ton. :]
(also, thanks @Yurcee for clarifying the difference between the two files for me)
