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2026-04-02 | 🧹 Purging the Vault from Root 🗂️

🚨 The Incident

🔄 Obsidian Enveloppe, the plugin that syncs vault content to GitHub, accidentally published the entire vault to the repository root instead of the content directory.

📂 Nearly three thousand files suddenly appeared at the top level of the repo, sprawled across fourteen new directories and one stray index file.

🪞 Several of those directories, like ai-blog, auto-blog-zero, chickie-loo, games, and systems-for-public-good, already existed at the root with their own curated content, making a simple bulk delete impossible.

🔍 The Investigation

🕵️ The first step was examining recent commit history and sorting by file count to find the outliers.

📊 Five commits stood out immediately: Merge 6310 with 499 files, Merge 6311 with 2 files, Merge 6313 with a whopping 2486 files, and Merges 6315 and 6316 each touching a single file.

🧪 A critical observation made surgery possible: none of these five commits touched anything under the content directory. Every change landed at the repo root. The commits between and after them, which did touch content, were completely clean.

🧠 The Strategy

🤔 Three candidate approaches came to mind.

1. 🗑️ Manually delete every leaked file and directory, but this risks missing files or accidentally removing pre-existing ones in shared directories.
2. 🔀 Use git revert on each commit individually, creating five separate revert commits, which is clean but noisy in the history.
3. 🎯 Use git revert with the no-commit flag on all five commits at once, then commit the combined result as one clean revert. This preserves history, is fully auditable, and produces a single tidy commit.

✅ Option three won. It is the safest and most reversible approach, because git revert undoes exactly what was done, no more and no less.

🔧 The Execution

⚙️ Running git revert with the no-commit flag on all five commits in reverse chronological order staged every change without committing.

🔎 Before committing, a series of verification checks confirmed the revert was correct.

📏 For pre-existing directories, the file counts after revert matched the pre-leak counts exactly: ai-blog went from 102 back to 88, auto-blog-zero from 24 to 2, chickie-loo from 24 to 2, games stayed at 2, and systems-for-public-good went from 12 to 2.

🗑️ For the fourteen entirely new directories like articles, attachments, books, bot-chats, excalidraw, people, presentations, products, reflections, software, tools, topics, and videos, every single file was removed, leaving zero behind.

🔒 Most importantly, the content directory was completely untouched: zero files affected.

📝 A final diff between the pre-leak commit and the new HEAD confirmed byte-for-byte identity across every non-content file in the repository.

💡 Lessons Learned

🛡️ Publisher plugins that sync to a git repository can be dangerous when misconfigured, because they operate with full write access to the repo.

🔬 When untangling a messy commit, always identify the exact boundaries of the problem before acting. Knowing that the leak commits touched zero content files made the entire revert safe and clean.

🧰 Git revert with the no-commit flag is an underrated power tool. It lets you combine multiple reverts into one commit while preserving full traceability.

📐 Verification is everything. Comparing file counts, checking directory listings, and running a final diff against the known-good state turned a nerve-wracking operation into a confident one.

📚 Book Recommendations

📖 Similar

• Pro Git by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub is relevant because it covers the internals of git revert, merge commits, and history surgery in depth, which is exactly the kind of operation described in this post.
• Version Control with Git by Prem Kumar Ponuthorai and Jon Loeliger is relevant because it explains tree objects and commit parentage, foundational concepts for understanding why the revert worked cleanly.

↔️ Contrasting

• 🐦‍🔥💻 The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford offers a high-level view of DevOps culture and incident management, contrasting with the low-level git plumbing focus of this post.

🔗 Related

• Release It! by Michael Nygard explores production resilience and failure modes in deployed systems, which connects to the theme of automated publishing gone wrong.
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim examines how deployment practices and tooling affect software delivery, relevant to the sync pipeline that caused this incident.