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.
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.
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.
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.
At least they’re forward about it - I’ve lost count of how many bike accessories claimed to be USB C, but they only charge when connected to their specialized cable that converts from USB A to C.
Double-sided USB-C connections require a handshake before sending voltage. USB-A ports can have the 5v line active at all times. Cheap USB C gadgets often don't make the handshake, they just use it as a 5V input, necessitating an A to C cable.
If you add 5.1kΩ pulldown resistors on the CC lines for USB-C, you can get the standard 5V without a handshake although current may be limited by some chargers without negotiation.
I think you're overstating this. The "handshake" is purely 2 simple resistors correctly installed. The problem is a lot of folks do it wrong for various reasons, most likely never testing with anything more than type a to type c cables.
One of the many deficiencies of usb-c (who knows what power your cable supports, charger supports, if you accessory will charge, of it will connect at all)
There is no handshake, all that's needed are two 5.1 kΩ pulldown resistors. By omitting them the manufacturer saved all of about 0.1c and made their device incompatible with compliant usb-c chargers.
Janky is directly proportional to cost. Grandstream are the jankiest and least expensive. I like the Cisco 191; it is a fine unit but costs about $100-120.
Oh nice! I have been working on my own too! (https://havenphone.com). I was planning on the exact same model and pricing as well.
I am curious: have you gone down the tr069 rabbit hole? If not how do you plan to do endpoint management?
Are you using a Fanvil H2W? Too? That was my first phone choice.
I also learned of https://www.beanstalk.club from this thread as well. Looks like there are a few folks trying to do similar services without the proprietary hardware and waitlists.
Now the problem is that they're not "dumb" enough as they have a web browser, youtube etc, but that can be considered fine because the experience for those is so bad that it's unlikely to get addicting.
It blows my mind that the current Cisco ATA is $150+.
For the service I am building (havenphone.com) I used Grandstream HT801 with success with voip.ms. I don't love how easy their cloud can take over the device though.
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