# Obsidian 2025-01 vault issue post-mortem This week I had a big issue with my Obsidian vault. Here's what happened: - I moved two files from one folder (containing a ton of notes) to a different folder - I messed up, or Obsidian did, and instead moved almost all most notes to a different folder - I didn't notice immediately - The auto note mover detected the files in the wrong location and moved those back - Obsidian froze and I didn't understand why - I killed Obsidian and restarted it - But it kept freezing - The problem is that my notes are stored in a Google Drive folder - When Google Drive saw the changes, it stored the files in the new location - And since the auto note mover plugin was keeping moving the files, it generated a storm of file move events - But my notes are also synchronized to different devices with Syncthing - When syncthing saw the file changes, it synchronized those, generated another storm of events - I noticed the issue and wanted to fix it, but didn't fully understood what was happening - I moved the folders back where they belong, but meanwhile the event storms continued - The files kept reappearing in the wrong folder - Auto note mover kept failing to move files back to where they belonged because the target folders did not exist anymore - And I messed up again, deleting the wrong copy, thinking I was fixing the issue - Actually I deleted my notes and lost them - And Syncthing synchronization just propagated the issue on all my devices - My devices were also configured to sync in both direction, also aggravating the issue - I had many backups in place, so I wanted to recover - But my main backups were not available. The Local Backup plugin in Obsidian did not run for over a month - My synchronized copies were also broken of course, as those are not backups - My Git backup was not up to date because I didn't commit and push the latest changes - So I was there with ~2 days of notes lost - And I wasn't sure how to recover I ended up losing about 2 days of notes. And that's a lot considering that I spent those working on my course, which is all in Obsidian! I ended up being able to recover by - Stopping Obsidian - Stopping file synchronizations with Syncthing - Letting Google Drive stabilize - Removing everything to have a clean vault folder - Reverting all local changes to the latest Git commit - Restoring files from the Google Drive trash folder - Saving everything back to Git - Resuming file synchronization with Syncthing This took me half a day in total. Now I've fixed my backup scripts and made sure everything is up to date. Moving forward, I'll save more often with Git to ensure I can more easily restore. I've added reminders to check the state of my backups more regularly. When Obsidian freezes, I'll stop it immediately, and try to understand what is happening underneath, and if there's an issue that I can notice at the Git level (unexpected local changes). I'll also make a backup before doing anything (so I don't aggravate the situation). I'll then make sure to fix the issue right away and let it all synchronize correctly before trying to restart Obsidian. Once fixed, I'll make sure to create a new backup with the current state. My conclusion is that no matter how many backups you have, if you don't verify it's all working, you're still in an unsafe place. Backups are hard. And it's really important to keep in mind that synchronization is not backup.