Emil

A plugin rewrote about two hundred notes for me because a template applied on file creation and the sync then created files on the other device, which triggered it again.

Back up first is not boilerplate here. The failure mode is automated, fast, and touches everything, and by the time you notice it has been running for a day.

On the indexing point: when a query returns nothing, check the field in a note that definitely should match, in the raw text. Nine times out of ten the field is in a place the indexer does not read, or the spelling drifted between notes.

The query is almost never wrong. The data is inconsistent and the query is honest about it.

A few hundred notes is exactly the size where hand-maintained indexes still work and feel unbearable.