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Obsidian LiveSync: manual Replicate works, automatic push doesn't — one clean reset and no more DB wipes

Environment: Obsidian Self-hosted LiveSync · CouchDB 3.3 backend · sync mode set to LiveSync (live mode)

TL;DR

When sync is broken, stop deleting and recreating the server database. Doing that can create a new failure of its own.

  • Manual Replicate works but automatic push doesn't — suspect that repeated wipes have broken the sync checkpoint. To be precise about what actually happened here: as I get into further down, cause 1 on its own can produce the same picture, and the observation that would separate them wasn't recorded. The recovery was one clean reset to a fresh vault and a fresh DB, followed by no more wiping. Whether simply stopping the wipes recovers an already-mismatched checkpoint is something I never tested.
  • Saving a note does nothing at all (the edit never even lands in the local DB) — accumulated local cache from repeated resets can make every startup throw Error during vault initialisation process, and LiveSync appears to stop watching files as a safety measure. In that state only a full scan like Verify and repair all files picks anything up; ordinary saves don't register.
  • Hit both at once and the fastest route is one clean reset to a fresh vault and a fresh DB — and then never wiping the DB again.

The symptoms

I'm writing this from the operational records kept at the time rather than re-running any of it today. The background for the whole series is in Self-hosted Obsidian instead of Notion.

The breakage showed up in two distinct forms.

Symptom 1 — edits aren't captured at all. Editing and saving a note did nothing. Not "didn't reach the other devices" — the change never landed in the local DB either. Yet running a full scan like Verify and repair all files by hand did pick it up. The files were fine; whatever detects that a file changed in real time was dead.

Symptom 2 — manual works, automatic doesn't. Pressing Replicate ran a replication that completed normally. The records only go as far as "manual worked," though — whether anyone confirmed a specific edit landing on another device isn't written down. With the plugin left in live mode, though, automatic push never fired. The connection was alive; the changes just didn't go up.

At the time I read them as two causes — both of which I took to be produced by the attempts to fix it.

The day started with getting a connection path working through Cloudflare, which ate more than half the day; the sync problem described here then ran into the evening. A full day, end to end.

The misdiagnoses (where most of the time went)

None of these were the cause. I'm recording them for anyone heading down the same road:

  • The Obsidian version. On the theory that 1.12.7 had broken something, the user downgraded to 1.11.7. Made no difference.
  • The LiveSync plugin version. In the app, the user swapped the plugin between 0.25.73 and 0.24.31. Same result.
  • Cloudflare's 100-second connection limit. That's the subject of the previous post. It's a real constraint, but it wasn't the cause here — after the transport moved to tailscale, which has no such limit, automatic push stayed just as broken. That observation is what finally killed the "it's the network" hypothesis.

Suspecting versions is a natural reflex, but a symptom that reproduces across versions isn't a version problem. I should have pivoted far sooner than I did.

What I blamed first: leftover local cache → the watcher shuts itself off

Across repeated cycles of enabling, disabling, and resetting the plugin, the local cache accumulated state that never got cleaned up. The result was Error during vault initialisation process every time Obsidian started.

The same message shows up for a different reason as well: a new device whose first fetch gets cut off mid-way throws it too, and that has nothing to do with this post — see when a new device's first sync stalls at 761/23585. What this post covers is the variant that fires on every startup of a device you were already using.

That's as far as the observation goes: saves didn't land in the local DB, but a full scan caught the same changes. The records from the time read that as LiveSync halting file watching as a safety measure — the thinking being that ingesting files while initialization is broken is a good way to corrupt them. That reading never got checked against the plugin's docs or its issue tracker, though; it was inferred from the symptoms. A full scan (Verify and repair all files) walks the files directly, which is why that path kept working.

The important thing here is that this state is silent. Nothing announces that file watching has been suspended; saving simply does nothing. So the search for a cause drifts toward the server or the network — when in fact the client had already stopped watching on its own.

What I blamed second: the repeated DB wipes

The second one is nastier, because the thing I ended up blaming was my own debugging.

Since sync wasn't working, the obvious move seemed to be "clear the server and start clean," so I deleted and recreated the CouchDB database several times. CouchDB will drop an entire database with a single HTTP API call — it does require the server admin credentials, which were already sitting on the server, but nothing like OS-level privileges. For something you can't undo, that bar is far too low.

LiveSync, meanwhile, tracks a checkpoint recording how far replication has progressed. When the server database vanishes and reappears, that checkpoint presumably no longer lines up, and in practice automatic push in live mode did not work in that state.

One boundary worth drawing: nothing in the records establishes that automatic push was working before the wipes started. By the time I started deleting databases, cause 1 had already broken sync. So "the wipes broke the checkpoint" is a diagnosis assembled from the symptoms, not something anyone watched happen.

Looking at it now, there's a competing explanation. With file watching off from cause 1, saves never reach the local DB — and LiveSync's live replication pushes from the local DB, not from the files. A dead watcher on its own produces exactly the picture of "automatic push never fires." Telling the two apart would have meant running the full scan to get changes into the local DB and then watching whether they went up without pressing anything. There's no such observation in the records.

And this alternative only holds if "manual worked" meant "a replication ran without errors" — if it meant someone watched an edit arrive on another device, then that edit was in the local DB, and the alternative collapses. The records don't settle which. None of this occurred to me at the time.

For what it's worth, manual Replicate continuing to work is consistent with the checkpoint reading too. A manual replication is closer to "compare both sides now and reconcile," so it appears to survive a mismatched checkpoint, while automatic push runs from that checkpoint and stalls.

In other words, the conclusion at the time was that my attempts to fix sync had quietly created a second failure. And because that failure looked much like the original one, every additional wipe made the diagnosis harder — a vicious cycle.

The fix

The diagnosis at the time was two causes, so each got dealt with separately.

  1. Reset once to a fresh vault and a fresh DB. (The vault side has to happen in the Obsidian app, so the user did that part.) The point is to not inherit the accumulated local cache. After this, the startup Error during vault initialisation process was gone, file watching worked again, and saves registered immediately.
  2. Then stop wiping the DB. With the server database left alone, automatic push worked in live mode as well.

The order matters. Establish a clean state once, then stop destroying it. Repeating "it's still broken, so wipe it again" regenerates cause 2 no matter how many times you do step 1.

One more caveat: both measures went in together, so I can't separate how much each contributed. What's established is that doing both made both symptoms go away.

Takeaways / checklist

  • "Manual replication works, automatic doesn't" is usually a state problem, not a network problem. If the connection were dead, manual wouldn't work either — the difference between them is the clue.
  • Wiping the server database is a last resort when debugging sync, not a first step. Do it repeatedly and it can become the cause itself. In anything that runs off checkpoints, "starting fresh" is not a safe action.
  • If saving does nothing, check whether the client has stopped watching before blaming anything else. It fails silently, which pushes you toward the server and the network when the answer may be at the other end.
  • If the symptom reproduces across versions, it isn't the version. Downgrading feels like a cheap experiment, so people keep reaching for it — but once the symptom reproduces, treat that hypothesis as dead and move on.