Tips & troubleshooting

Back up your vault

This plugin writes to every Markdown file it sees. Before enabling it on a real vault, take a backup (Obsidian Sync snapshot, git commit, filesystem copy, or whatever you normally use). Unexpected interactions with other plugins or sync tools could produce changes you didn’t intend.

Multi-device sync conflicts

When enabled on multiple devices at once, this plugin can create sync conflicts. It reacts to all file modifications — including those produced by your sync tool writing remote changes to disk. If Obsidian is open on two devices simultaneously, each one can trigger front-matter updates in response to the other’s syncs, leading to conflict files.

Recommended workarounds:

• Only leave Obsidian running on one device at a time, or
• Enable the plugin on a single device (typically the one where you do most of your editing), or
• Disable the plugin and re-enable it only when you need a bulk update pass.

Relevant context: the original issue that inspired this simplified reimplementation is beaussan/update-time-on-edit-obsidian#75.

Excalidraw files are skipped

If you use the Excalidraw plugin, its .excalidraw.md files are detected via the plugin’s ExcalidrawAutomate global and excluded automatically. No extra configuration is required.

Troubleshooting

The updated / created properties are not being written

Check, in order:

1. The plugin is enabled — Settings → Community plugins → Update Time toggle is on.
2. The file is not in an excluded folder — look at the Folders to exclude list in the plugin settings; any file whose path starts with one of those entries is skipped.
3. The file is Markdown — .md only. .canvas, .excalidraw.md, and Canvas.md are skipped.
4. The file is not empty — an empty body short-circuits the handler.
5. The file’s front matter is valid YAML — malformed YAML is logged as a warning (open the developer console: View → Toggle developer tools) and the file is left untouched.

The updated value doesn’t change on every edit

That is intentional. updated is only refreshed when the file’s mtime moves ahead of the recorded value by more than one minute. This debounce avoids fighting active edits and reduces diff churn.

Property names don’t match my existing notes

Currently the property names are hard-coded (created, updated). Customization is tracked in issue #2.

Reporting issues

Issues and feature requests: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-update-time/issues.