1. Vault Repair
Vault Repair is an interactive workflow for repairing frontmatter and schema-related metadata problems.
Run:
Forge: Vault Repair
Forge opens a review modal that lets you inspect suggested repairs before applying them.
Vault Repair is intentionally designed to feel more like a careful repair bench than an automatic cleanup machine.
What Vault Repair Is For
Vault Repair helps fix common metadata consistency problems such as:
- missing required fields
- invalid enum values
- malformed metadata
- schema drift
- inconsistent field values
- frontmatter structure issues
- metadata problems surfaced by Vault Lint
Vault Repair is especially useful when cleaning up older vaults that evolved without consistent metadata rules.
Typical Workflow
A practical repair workflow usually looks like this:
- Run Forge: Run Vault Lint
- Review the lint findings
- Run Forge: Vault Repair
- Review proposed repairs carefully
- Select which repairs should apply
- Confirm the repair run
- Re-run Vault Lint
Forge is designed around iterative cleanup instead of giant one-shot migrations.
Review-First Design
Vault Repair is intentionally review-first.
It should not be treated as a blind auto-fix button.
The modal allows you to:
- inspect proposed changes
- apply repairs selectively
- review affected notes
- avoid unwanted bulk edits
This helps keep vault maintenance safer and more predictable.
What Vault Repair Does Not Do
Vault Repair does not attempt to:
- rewrite note prose
- restructure headings
- repair Shapes
- reorganize folders
- silently mutate metadata
It focuses specifically on frontmatter and schema-related repair workflows.
For heading structure repair, use:
Forge: Run Shape Repair
instead.
Relationship to Vault Lint
Vault Repair works best after running Vault Lint.
Vault Lint identifies problems.
Vault Repair helps resolve them interactively.
Common workflow:
schema → lint → repair → lint again
Over time, this helps the vault become:
- easier to query
- easier to maintain
- more reliable for Dataview
- more reliable for Bases
- more consistent for exports
- easier to use with AI workflows
Recommended Safety Practices
Before large repair runs:
- use Git if possible
- ensure backups exist
- verify sync/version history systems work
- test on smaller folders first
Good backup systems include:
- Git
- Obsidian Sync
- Time Machine
- OneDrive version history
- Dropbox version history
Storage is cheaper than reconstructing accidentally damaged metadata by hand.
Start Small
Most users should begin with:
- one folder
- one note type
- one schema improvement at a time
Examples:
- standardizing
status - fixing malformed dates
- normalizing tags
- adding missing
typefields
Gradual cleanup usually produces more stable long-term systems than aggressive bulk repair.
Recommended Companion Workflows
Vault Repair works especially well alongside:
- Vault Lint
- Normalize Tags
- Normalize Frontmatter
- Patch workflows
- Shape validation
Together these workflows help reduce metadata drift over time.
