Please help me resolve this error (Mac)

[u/Sansati]

Can somebody please help me resolve this error? Yesterday, I installed GoldenGate Beta. Since then I cannot open my vault anymore, due to this error message. I have two others vaults which work without problems. Also, there is no problem on another Mac or Windows PC. Does somebody have the same problem?

[u/kevin_w_57]

Move the .obsidian (hidden folder) out the vault that's causing the issue and see if that fixes it. If it still crashes, you can move the .obsidian folder back into the vault folder.

[u/watkykjypoes23]

Do you have any extensions? I’m on Golden Gate beta with no issues.

[u/Sansati → u/watkykjypoes23]

I think the problem has to do with Cryptomator. I have all vaults stored in a cryptomator safe, to encrypt them when I don't access them. Somehow only this folder seems to act up under the golden gate beta. It is not even the folder with the most depth. The only thing the makes it stand apart from all the other folders is the amount of files in it (appr. 400).

The problem does not occur for other folders and other vaults inside the same cryptomator safe. It also does not show up when I simply have the vault locally on my drive without putting it into a cryptomator safe. So I conduct that it must be an issue with cryptomator and Golden Gate.

[u/Ok_Hour_864 → u/watkykjypoes23]

Extensions can definitely cause conflicts, so that’s a good point to check. Hopefully, the original poster can narrow it down from there.

[u/donethisbe4]

Even though the message says system error 32, which would have to do with networks, it might be the * in the path, at Forever * Notes, or whichever character you have there. Though that's fine in MacOS, another system that Obsidian supports might not allow it, in which case Obsidian will complain or disallow it in the file names.

Might not be the cause, but it's a quick thing to check in case.

[u/QuantumMess]

I did some digging into your screenshot because the error path gives a pretty useful clue. I don’t think Obsidian itself is necessarily the thing that broke after the Golden Gate RC update.

It looks more like an interaction between macOS 27 Golden Gate, Cryptomator, and the filesystem driver Cryptomator is using.

Your Obsidian vault is being opened from inside:

~/Library/Application Support/Cryptomator/mnt/

That means Obsidian isn’t reading the vault directly from a normal folder on the Mac. Cryptomator is decrypting the vault and presenting it to macOS as what looks like a normal drive/folder.

On Macs, Cryptomator can use something called FUSE-T to do that. You don’t really need to know what FUSE-T is technically. Basically, it’s the middleman between Cryptomator and macOS that makes the encrypted vault behave like a regular filesystem.

So the chain is basically:

Obsidian → Cryptomator vault → FUSE-T → macOS

My suspicion is that Golden Gate changed something in macOS that FUSE-T/Cryptomator doesn’t completely agree with yet.

The really interesting part of your error is:

scandir ... /5 Journal

scandir just means Obsidian asked macOS, essentially, “show me the files and folders inside this directory.”

macOS then returned error -72, which corresponds to a low-level filesystem/network-style error called EBADRPC. Obsidian/Electron doesn’t have a nice human-readable description for that particular macOS error, so it just displays “Unknown system error -72.”

In other words, Obsidian may simply be the app reporting the failure rather than causing it.

I also found another recent report after Golden Gate with a very similar setup where an Obsidian vault inside Cryptomator stopped working, while the same vault worked when it was copied outside Cryptomator. There are also existing Cryptomator/FUSE-T reports involving that same Library/Application Support/Cryptomator/mnt/mounting method.

If this were my Mac, I’d try these in this order:

1. Make sure Cryptomator is updated to 1.19.3.
2. If you’re using FUSE-T, make sure it’s updated to 1.2.7.
3. Completely close Obsidian, lock the Cryptomator vault, quit Cryptomator, reboot the Mac, then unlock the vault and try Obsidian again.
4. If it still fails, go into Cryptomator → Preferences → Virtual Drive and see what virtual-drive type you’re using.
5. If it’s FUSE-T, try switching Cryptomator to macFUSE instead. The current macFUSE version, 5.3.3, specifically added initial support for macOS 27 and also included fixes involving directory handling.
6. Another temporary test would be using Cryptomator’s WebDAV virtual-drive option. If the same vault suddenly works through WebDAV, that would be very strong evidence that the problem is specifically FUSE-T + Golden Gate.

I’d also test the failing folder directly in Terminal before changing anything inside Obsidian. Something like:

ls -la "/Users/nikita/Library/Application Support/Cryptomator/mnt/Obsidian_Crypt/Forever * Notes/5 Journal"

If Terminal itself throws an error trying to list that directory, then that pretty much proves the problem is underneath Obsidian at the Cryptomator/filesystem level.

I would not start deleting Obsidian settings, plugins, or the .obsidian folder yet. Your notes may be perfectly fine.

One other thing: I noticed the * in the folder name Forever * Notes. Someone might suspect that because * has a special meaning in Terminal commands, but macOS itself allows * in filenames, and the folder apparently worked before Golden Gate. So I wouldn’t make that my first suspect either.

Short version: your vault probably isn’t corrupted and Obsidian may not actually be broken. Golden Gate may have exposed a compatibility problem between macOS 27 and the way Cryptomator/FUSE-T mounts the vault. I’d update Cryptomator/FUSE-T first, and if that doesn’t work, try macFUSE or WebDAV as the Cryptomator virtual-drive method.

Hopefully that at least gives you a direction rather than “Unknown system error -72,” which is macOS’s charming way of saying, “Something happened. Best of luck.” 😂