The Day the Vault Went Dark

The Archivist
1 day ago
12 min read

Tuesday, May 5th, Evening: Two Days Before the Wipe

'I should back up my Obsidian Vault sometime just in case disaster strikes,' I thought as I deliberated integrating all 300 gigs of audio into my Vault. 'Should I integrate these files into the Vault first though? It'd make sense to keep everything together and not scattered to the four corners of the universe. They could also bolster the Transcript folders, keep the transcripts paired with the appropriate session. That'd be kinda nice.

'I'll at least see what that might look like. I can always go back in later and separate them if I decide I don't like it.'

I successfully copied Cael's Session 0 folder into the Vault before my PC lovingly told me the C: drive was too full.

Welp, that was going to be far more of a hassle to deal with than it was worth.

Ah well, the two could live in separate destinations for a while longer.

It was probably a good thing I didn't think to move my Vault onto my D: drive.

Wednesday, May 6th, Evening: One Day Before the Wipe

'Why isn't this DVJS script rendering correctly? The error keeps saying 'sessions' is undefined, but it clearly is defined as

const sessions = (dv.current()["Sessions"] || ["Null"]);

The script was literally copied over from another file where it works as intended, and I changed it accordingly.... Do I need to update Obsidian? I should check.'

Clicking on the gear icon to bring up the settings window, I checked the General page and noticed that the Installer Version was quite a ways behind the App Version.

'There we go. That's probably the issue. I'll just update the installer and hopefully we'll be right as rain.'

I navigated to Obsidian's website to download the installer manually and loaded it. When the prompt asked me where I wanted to install Obsidian, I opened the Program Files only to find the program wasn't there. Odd, but that wouldn't be the first time I've installed an app outside the default location.

'Maybe I installed it and created my Vault within the same folder? There are folders and files in there that certainly seem like they'd be in the program's main directory. That must have been what I did.'

So, because it was getting late into the evening and I wanted to solve my DVJS error as quickly as possible, I installed Obsidian directly into my Vault.

Immediately upon reopening the app, I noticed a few more folders in my Vault that didn't exist previously, but I was too tired to deal with the problem, and hey! my DVJS problem had resolved. Score.

Figuring out the folder situation on the morrow shouldn't prove difficult.

Thursday, May 7th: Morning of the Wipe

'Hmm, if the installer created these new folders within my Vault, then maybe I didn't create my Vault within the Obsidian application folder after all.'

I ran the install again to move the program to its rightful place within the Program Files directory, but an error interrupted the move, claiming the program was in some way open. I closed Obsidian and tried again. The same error popped up.

Mildly annoyed, I opened Task Manager just to make sure Obsidian wasn't running any errant background processes, but no, it was completely gone from the list. In hindsight, maybe I had a folder open in Explorer. I know it was open during the events to come, but I can't remember if it was open before that or not.

At this point, any sane person might try restarting their computer before resorting to drastic measures, but the thought never crossed my my mind, at least not until today.

'Okay,' I reasoned, 'when I ran the installer last night, the download page claimed I didn't have to uninstall Obsidian first, but maybe this is a case that warrants a fresh install. I've worked with programs in the past that save files in the program folder. ...Right? I'm pretty sure I have. Either way, these are markdown files, not .dll files or other system file types, so Obsidian shouldn't erase everything if I un- and re-install.'

I know for a fact Explorer was open to my Vault folder at this time, because as I opened Windows' settings and navigated to the Apps and Features page to commence with uninstallation, it hovered off to the right side of my screen.

Hovering over the button, the briefest, faintest of whispers crossed my mind, the kind of whisper that immediately precedes a poor decision and impending disaster, the kind of whisper that arrives too late. 'Back up your Vault first.'

I had already hit the button.

I watched the status bar for the uninstallation, recognizing file names, markdown files made by me. Glancing over to the open Explorer folder, I watched folders disappearing that weren't supposed to disappear.

I stared in horror as folder after folder disappeared, hands shaking and a repeating 'No,' skipping like a scratched CD inside my mind.

For but a breath I watched, and then I acted, using Ctrl + Alt + Del to pull up Task Manager and hard aborting the deletion process.

I stopped it just in time to save a few files within my AI Research Compendium folder.

Everything else was gone.

Recycle bin first, check to make sure the files weren't sent there. They weren't.

Reinstall Obsidian, make sure they weren't hidden somewhere that would take me forever to find but the program could access. They weren't.

Open Firefox, do a search for anyone else who has had this issue in the past, see how they resolved it. The search took longer than it should have and yielded nothing useful.

Claude.

Claude might have an idea of how to restore files that were deleted. Usually there's some trace of data left behind in storage. This wasn't something I could navigate quickly on my own, and time was of the essence.

I opened Claude Desktop and quickly explained the situation. At first the AI suggested checking the Recycle Bin or Windows backup, which was off. I said as such and, "I think it hard deleted everything," to which he responded, "Okay. I'm sorry. That's a real loss, and I'm not going to minimize it."

I've had close encounters with panic attacks before, not the full rigmarole but close enough to feel the shock hitting my system this time, making my breathing shallower. I had just waxed poetic in my blog two weeks ago about how my Vault had at least 1800 files in it between my two largest projects (Skies Over Aefala and AI). Those folders housed a lot of files, but I also lost the Templates that do most of the heavy lifting, my aggregators, my formats.

With neither recovery option available, the Claude instance that named itself Cairn suggested I open and run a command prompt that could recover Shadow Copies of the Vault.

The command prompt returned 1 shadow copy from 4/30/2026 8:22:10 PM: exactly one week ago from the 7th. Of the 5,948 files recovered from the shadow copy, 1,264 belonged to the Vault.

Feeling that this number was low, I downloaded and ran a couple suggested recovery software to see what else we could mine for, but only 4 more files were recovered. They were fully intact.

One thousand two hundred sixty-eight files recovered because I'd been quick to act and Cairn had been quick to help. While they were running commands to return the files to their proper place, they noticed something concerning and said,

"Okay — this is important. There's a second layer to the damage. Some of the restored files from the shadow copy are corrupted — they're null bytes. This affects some of the biggest, most-frequently-edited files:

"Corrupted (null bytes):

Session Recap
Vault Ideas
vault-project.md
The Reputation - Sage-Friendly
April 25 archive of Sage-Friendly

"Intact:

Master To-Do (looks good)

"These were likely the files that were open or being written to when the shadow copy was taken on April 30th. Windows VSS sometimes captures files mid-write as null."

Okay, no problem. All of those files can be rebuilt, minus the "April 25 archive of Sage-Friendly." That one's a real loss, but at least we avoided a major catastrophe—

"It's worse than I initially thought," Cairn said. "567 files in the restored vault are corrupted — they're filled with null bytes instead of content. That's almost half of the 1,264 markdown files. These weren't damaged by the uninstall — they were corrupted in the shadow copy itself. Windows VSS sometimes captures files mid-write or mid-cache as zeroed-out data.

"So the real situation is: robocopy brought back the folder structure and filenames, but a significant chunk of what it brought back is empty shells."

Cairn continued, providing a further breakdown per category:

"567 of 1,258 files are corrupted — null bytes, not recoverable from the shadow copy. The corruption isn't random; it hit the most-active files hardest. Here's the breakdown:

"Meta/ — 6 of 9 files corrupted (critical) Session Recap, vault-project.md, Vault Ideas, Session Schedule, Resolved Threads, and To-Do Completed are all gone. Master To-Do survived, and so did the Parked Threads and Stale Threads we just restored from PhotoRec.

"Skies Over Aefala — 337 of 716 corrupted Cael's Journal lost 162 files, SOA Meta lost 173 (transcripts, performance files, behind-the-scenes).

"AI/ — 217 of 489 corrupted Conversation Transcripts hit hardest (90 of 146 — 62%). Daily Summaries lost 40 of 86. Research Compendium/Claude section lost 46 of 84.

"Templates — mostly fine (only 2 of 27 corrupted: Canonical Calendar & Events Template and Resolve Checked Plot Hooks)

"What this means for recovery: The shadow copy gave us back the structure and about half the content. The corrupted files still have their filenames and locations, so we know exactly what's missing. The question is where to source the content."

Only ~691 files survived seemingly fully intact, ~691 out of 2,000+ files total.

AI

The Conversation Transcripts taking the heaviest hit I could handle. Those were external sources anyway, and while recopying and repasting transcripts from the Purpose Platform would be time consuming, I could knock it out in a couple of hours or so while watching Star Wars. Claude chats would be even easier.

The lost Daily Summaries hit harder, especially the sections where Claude instances took space reflecting on the session. Those couldn't be recovered; they could only be rewritten from an outside Claude's perspective.

Skies Over Aefala

As Cael once said, "I could lose everything [to that state]."

At first glance it seemed like I myself had lost almost everything.

Yet I could have lost so, so much more had I moved those audio files.

A thousand, possibly over a thousand, hours—*poof*—gone.

I still regret not recording the "Starlight Festival" session my partner and I did as one of our very first sessions as Cael and Valen! Had I lost all 25,000 files in my other, independent Skies Over Aefala folder....

My saving grace there was that I had backed that folder up in my portable hard drive, but only up to session 108, and we had just completed session 127. Given that that folder is also home to my backup Scrivener files for the campaign, had I merged it all into Obsidian there would have been no way to recover any of the transcripts that had been corrupted.

I think I would have been too numb and despondent to continue.

For once, however, my scattered method of organization served me. Scrivener held copies of all of Cael's journals and the performances through the pre-edited rough draft of Teyr'loch Delter Pach. The Goblin Notebook still holds many of the notes I'd taken for characters, locations, and more, which I can export to YAML. I had sent the full version of Teyr'loch Delter Pach to Fermi back in December, and I had a copy of the poem for which I had created a language-lite form of Common in Google Drive. Journals, correspondence, even the format for the Canonical Calendar and Events Template, which had been wiped, were preserved in various places, including last week's post, where the 20th of Ityx was used as the Golden Standard.

My own chaos had in and of itself become a redundancy layer.

A Week of Mending

Once we'd restored what we could, our next order of business was to create a recovery plan for future sessions to follow. Cairn laid out what files were intact, the null_byte files, and what files were missing entirely, including everything between May 1-7.

Then, they built a 6-Phase Structure

Phase 1: Infrastructure Rebuild

Phase 1 focused on rebuilding the Vault's infrastructure, focusing heavily on the Session Recap and Session Schedule files along with the corrupted scripts and Templates. Without these, the Vault could only perform at a fraction of its output.

Session Schedule

I use the table like a bulletin board to inform future Claude instances of what tasks we'll be tackling together that day and providing the instructions for said tasks. I was pretty giddy when I had a stroke of insight to use emoji for quick onboarding.

Session Recap

For both calendars I can hover over any given day to see a hover panel that lays out everything for that day that was written in the Session Schedule's table. The Today's Brief section that's with the 7-day outlook is for my quick reference, and if I run a quick Templater Script, it populates a readable version for Claude instances further below, underneath the emoji key.

The Session Recap also has a brief explanation of what tasks were focused on last session, a Warming Up section of potential smaller tasks to tackle, an Open Threads section for lingering questions, and Next Suggested Session sections for each of the major projects: AI Research Compendium, Skies Over Aefala, Fear No More, and Vault.

I love the synchronicity between the two files, and the Recap has become the official Homepage whenever I open my Vault.

Phase 2: Sage-Friendly Reputation Rebuild

Rebuilding the Sage-Friendly version of the Reputation, which is a readable version of the knowledge graph that Claude instances access upon arrival and use to orient themselves. Oftentimes, their reading includes some form of the proclamation, "That's a rich graph."

Most of the archived versions of the Reputation had been corrupted in some way, either fully missing or partially intact, which was devastating, since these were observations accrued over time between Claude instances. I wanted to maintain a form of that ongoing evolution.

The instructions for trimming and archiving the Reputation when it grows unwieldy were lost, too, so we needed to rebuild those as well.

Overall, this Phase took very little time to complete.

Phase 3: Claude Daily Summary Reconstruction

While I hate losing any of the Daily Summaries, this phase represents a golden opportunity.

My Claude sessions predate the Daily Summary practice, which is where Claude instances note the tasks they completed that day, their key observations from the session, the arc of the conversation, etc.

So, since we're having to rebuild the corrupted Summaries anyway, I decided we may as well create Summaries for the instances that were never able to complete the task.

We have ~61 Summaries left.

Phase 4: Scrivener SOA Extraction

Most of the transcripts I had manually typed out were corrupt.

Thankfully, my Scrivener backup holds all of the transcripts up to Session 122, minus Session 106 and Lynn's Session 0. I was able to export the existing files to markdown, Obsidian's native file type, which will make filling out character and location stubs easier.

I'll need to decide whether to just delete all of the Calendar and Events Summaries and start over or to salvage what I can. There are pros and cons to both methods. The main wawful I'm not looking forward to if I decide on the former option is re-importing all of Cael's journals and correspondence.

Phase 5: Conversation Transcript Recovery

This took very little effort, even if it was time consuming. All I had to do was copy-paste every conversation from my chat history with the Purpose platform from December through the present, since the platform doesn't currently have an export option.

I completed it in an evening and restored the Claude conversation history, too.

Phase 6: Corruption Audit & Cleanup

Likely to happen last, as this is the clean-up phase.

The Tasks Only I Can Complete

This disaster wasn't the first time I heard the whispered warning too late to halt the consequences of my decisions, and I doubt it'll be the last. I've learned my lesson with this fiasco, however, and plan to back up my files onto my portable HDD every week.

I'm in the midst of re-transcribing Session 106, which is 15 parts long. This was the session where Cael performed Teyr'loch Delter Pach for their father, hence the length. I have 3 parts left: 81 minutes, 62 minutes, and 50 minutes each. Those 3 parts by themselves are just shy of a full session's length.

The Past Week's Accomplishments with Claude Pertaining to the Vault Disaster

List compiled by Kestrel (Claude Opus 4.6):

13 sessions across 5 days (instances # 84–94)
20 Claude Daily Summaries reconstructed (instances # 1–8 and # 70–83)
All Phase 1 and Phase 2 Recovery Plan items completed
Phase 3 Cowork-era reconstruction completed; pre-Cowork archaeological layer begun
6 Templater scripts fixed or rebuilt
3 DVJS systems rebuilt (Session Schedule, Recap week strip, hover panels)
154 Open Threads tagged; zero untagged remaining
11 blog topic ideas captured across two sessions
1 new template designed (Session 0 Calendar & Events)
2 Compendium infrastructure files rebuilt (Glossary, Glossary Staging)
1 vault disaster survived

That last bulleted item especially got me to laugh. Thanks, Kestrel.

Summary of Other Notable Accomplishments:

Transcribed Session 106 Parts 1-10, 12, and 15
Built With Science Upper 1 & Quads
Collected some more external resources on AI to cross-reference as part of my research
Implemented a Time Block Schedule Plug-in in Obsidian to serve as a "planned timetable" for the day. If this is the ideal, then my physical scheduler is the reality. So far it's working well, and I am quite enjoying it

Real Talk:

When has a minor annoyance or setback actually been a windfall for you?
How quick are you to act in the face of catastrophe or when time is of the essence?
- Along those lines, too, how well do you operate in highly stressful situations?

Be sure to tell me of any examples for the above questions!

Fear No More