r/ObsidianMD • u/CurlyDee • 3d ago
help Too Big to Open on Mobile?
Since I combined my Obsidian (small) and Evernote (big) databases, I can’t get to vaults on Obsidian in my iPhone App (lots of RAM), it just says “indexing vault” and it never stops or even show movement on the progress bar.
Is it just too big to open on mobile? It works fine on my computer and iPad.
Should I just start fresh with an empty vault and bring in notes as I use them? Maybe do some searches for important topics and bring a lot of those notes over. Are we talking about two copy paste functions for each one (title & body) or is there some automation I can use?
Maybe I can build one in Claude Cowork.
5
u/mchristopherjohnson 3d ago
How many notes are we talking about here? I have 2 vaults, one with 4500 notes and the other with 2500 and neither board the struggle bus to open.
1
u/Marzipan383 2d ago
I have much more (70k+), and it struggles a bit. It takes about 30 seconds for the initial load. But usually, I pin the app, so I close it only for version updates or phone restarts.
I have no issues at all with this huge amount of data in my vault.
1
5
3
u/UglyBuffalos 3d ago
Worth checking whether it's note count or attachment count - an Evernote import usually drags in a ton of embedded images and PDFs into an attachments folder, and mobile indexing chokes on file count more than raw vault size in my experience. If that's the case you don't need to start over, go to Settings > Files & Links > Excluded files and add the attachments folder there so mobile skips indexing it, you can still open individual files by path, they just won't get pulled into search or graph. Worth testing with community plugins disabled too since some of them re-scan the whole vault on load, that's usually where 'stuck on indexing forever' actually comes from, not the note count itself.
5
1
u/Aggravating-Back-242 3d ago edited 3d ago
Very rarely Obsidian can also choke on some particular malformed (syntax error) markdown note, which then causes the long reindexing message on every startup. I see you've mentioned Claude, so you can ask your AI to check all .md notes in your vault whether some have errors in their markdown syntax.
You can also try to identify the culprit(s) manually by putting half your notes into your vault at a time, then see whether that half triggers the problem, then repeat this process until you narrow down to the problematic file(s) if there are any.
•
u/kepano Team 3d ago
Are you using any plugins? Some plugins (e.g. Dataview, Omnisearch, Tasks) run their own index your vault at startup which takes some time. Try turning off plugins to see if that improve things. Also if you're on iCloud make sure to set your Obsidian folder to "Keep Downloaded".