Finding Isolated (Orphaned?) Notes

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1

TLDR; how can I find all notes that have neither an inbout or an outbound link. Isolated (if not orphaned) notes?

What I’m trying to do

I would like to find all orphaned notes. My definition of an orphan note is one that has no outbound or inbound links. I would like to do this to clean up my vault a little. I’d move any orphans into an orphanage folder and then periodically review that folder looking for associations over time.

Things I have tried

I tried the Graph View but, regardless of what Gemini tells me, doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried to filter with -has:link and is:orphan. Gemini is not a very good Obsidian guide.

I tried the community plugin “Find orphaned files and broken links” 1.10.1 by Vinzent. It identies Orphans as files with no backlinks. But that’s not my working definition. If a note is associated by a link (in or out) to another note, it is not an orphan.

I guess the plugin makes things easier in that it lists files with at least one link missing. I could just open up each file looking for outbound links. But that’s pretty painful and not really ideal for regular audits.

2

OK, I got it. I just create a new Base showing file backlinks and file links and, with some sorting, it’s easy to find notes that have neither. I was overcomplicating things.

3

Definitely prefer Obsidian’s official help site to Gemini. Neither of those is a thing, as you found.

If you ever want to refine that, I believe it’s possible to make a base that will show only the orphans (but I don’t know enough to be able to say how).

4

To show only the orphans, you could combine these two filters:

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image812×422 17.4 KB

It’s the same logic you were already using but lets the filters take care of the part you were visually managing. And it frees up your sorting to do other stuff if you want it to.

    filters:
      and:
        - "!file.links"
        - "!file.backlinks"
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