Hacker News Reader

Comment by philips | Hacker News Reader

I love Obsidian, have written a popular plugin, and my wife and I use it for TODO lists and various planning.

However, every few weeks the official Obsidian sync makes an absolute mess of our shopping list (which has fairly frequent edits and deletions across our laptops and phones). I have no idea how to fix it.

This thread shows other users having the exact same issue as us: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-incorrectly-duplic...

If it wasn't for this one issue I would be able to strongly recommend the tool but as it is now I just tell people it sort of works and I am mildly happy.

To be fair I don't think any of the popular alternatives like logseq or joplin even attempt to do automatic file merges and just dump files into a conflict mode.

View on HN

For me, Obsidian started to silently and (seemingly) randomly replace the whole content of a note with the content of another random note. This has been happening to other people as well for some time now [1].

What makes this issue really terrifying is its silent nature. I only noticed one of the notes having had its content replaced while casually exploring my library.

It took me an hour to restore the original content, which I only managed to do thanks to a (very obscure) macOS feature that keeps versions of most text files. It is only possible to see these versions when opening the file (in this case, the note) in TextEdit. I haven't found another place in the UI where these versions are exposed, which is yet another interesting thing I did not know about the OS I have been using for years now. I wonder why Apple does not expose this feature in the right click menu in Finder, for example.

In any case, as much as I love Obsidian I have been rarely and cautiously using it since this happened. File safety is the bare minimum requirement, so I cannot recommend Obsidian as it is right now.

[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/content-of-a-note-totally-replac...

What sync method are you using?

I have my vault saved in iCloud Drive and solely access it from a single device.

We all know about iCloud Drive being known for being somewhat unreliable and sometimes causing sync issues, but I don't really see this type of bug being caused by it. I would be more suspecting if files were corrupted or changed in some other form than being replaced by other notes' contents.

The kind of issue points to Obsidian as the cause to me. Some commenters in the discussion I linked were hypothesizng about some kind of race condition or rare bug when opening two different notes in the same Obsidian window/tab in sequence and suggested using an extension that works by opening each note in a new tab, which I haven't tried. I try to work with as few extensions as possible to reduce any kind of attack risk.

I am very open to help or different interpretations of what I experienced though.

Make sure to set your Obsidian folder to "Keep downloaded" on iCloud for every device. Otherwise iCloud automatically deletes files locally to save space on your device.

It's a terrible default and Apple doesn't provide any way for developers to detect if it's off.

Thanks for the advice. I have "Keep downloaded" enabled already for all my devices, so it does not seem to be the cause for this issue, although I am sure it may be a factor for others.

Almost all ways to sync Obsidian has a problem with multiple people editing the same file.

Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".

But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.

Sure, lots of apps have this issue but I assumed it would work since they advertise the feature: https://obsidian.md/help/sync/collaborate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com