Ever since I started using Tahoe - the glassy latest version of Macos - on one of my Macs, text syncing has felt less reliable.
The core of my system is Obsidian pointed to a folder in Icloud, and on the phone I most often use Bebop to quickly add text to the current day's text file.
Nice and simple and - most of the time - quite reliable.
But in the past few months, I have started catching mistakes.
Sometimes the most benign version, where a second daily note with a "2" appended to its name appears. I simply cut and paste the things I want to the main file, delete the second one, and move on.
But sometimes, I would open a computer and start typing, then later notice something missing. I was then able to command-z back and rescue text which came in through Icloud. Close call, and quite annoying.
Luckily, there is a good part.
Yesterday, I discovered a whole long section missing from the previous day's file. A section I had put some thought into and not only was quite happy with but also knew I would want to use in the future. No amount of undo/redo or optimistic checking of other devices helped.
Then, I discovered Obsidian's core plugin "File recovery". Enabled by default, it saves the state of your files every five minutes and keeps that history for a whole week! Just go into Settings -> Core plugins -> File recovery and click the "View" button to select a file and see what has been saved.
Sure enough, my text was there, and by skipping through the snapshots I could also see where a note from my phone came bumbling in and over-wrote it.
I am still not sure what I should do about the actual issue. Apart from watching things like a hawk and hope that future updates help resolve it. Perhaps I should start saving Bebop's notes to a separate file name, just to be on the safe side?
In any case: snapshots, what a life saver!