When did Obsidian stop being “just notes” for you?

Knowledge management
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I’m fairly new to the forum, so apologies if this has been asked before. I’ve been reading through a lot of older threads and I keep noticing the same pattern.

People seem to start using Obsidian for notes, writing, research, bookmarks, daily notes, etc. But then at some point the vault becomes something quite a bit more important than that.

For some people it looks like work/project history. For others it’s personal admin, study notes, family stuff, health notes, tasks, writing drafts, decisions, or just years of thinking in one place.

I’m curious where that line was for people here.

Was there a point where you realised your vault had become something you actually depended on, rather than just somewhere you kept notes?

And did that change how you treated it? For example:

  • backups
  • sync
  • plugins
  • mobile
  • what you were willing to put in there
  • whether you kept work/personal things together or separate

I’m asking partly because I’m still figuring out my own setup, but also because it seems like once a vault gets important enough, the decisions around it become less about “which notes app do I like?” and more about “what am I comfortable relying on?”

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It just grew, caused by managing a big scientific project. Whenever I learned some technique or something outside of obsidian (i.E. Kanban, Zettelkasten, journaling,…) there usually was a way to make it work in obsidian. Sometimes with some fiddeling. And sometimes obsidian just provided auxiliary information and structure. At no point i was feeling restricted by the software. So there was never a reason to ditch or even question it.

I do have backups on a personal nextcloud (and thus multiple systems) and a homeserver. Phone is a no for me, because i need big screens. Also nextcloud sync is fucked on phone and i am to lazy to properly setup an alternative. But that’s not a problem caused by obsidian.

I think Obsidian is a tool, that is so good, it works like an OS. I’d even go so far to say, that it is the alternative to my data-explorer. So almost every navigation on my machine can work through Obsidian. The Plugins are just extending this tool. Which Plugins i use depends more on the externalities. But i usually find a plugin or way to make it work. Though sometimes there is some highly-specific thing i cannot achieve in Obsidian, it’s still fine. Because it can act as a hub.

For example I make my budgeting with MMEX. But i have the file in the obsidian vault. And a lot of auxiliary data is in Obsidian, contextualizing this database. For example files with the reasoning behind the budgets or investment strategies. I always have some benefit from connecting things to Obsidian in some way.

I put everything in the vault. My redundancies make it very unlikely that i lose data. From the data-security-standpoint i have no reason for not trusting obsidian. For the plugins it might be sensible to think about data-security. But ehh… I use AI with access to my vault. I use google. So even if it were an issue, Obsidian (and its plugin) would be negligible in the grad scheme of things…

Also compared to before, i have no local duplicates. I used to copy a file to a different folder “for backup”. You think i know which files i worked on? I only have this problem when working outside of obsidian. (Also git helps in the worst case…)

I decided to keep my work and personal things in the same vault. But within it, the content is separated. So if need arises, i would be able to split it within a couple of hours, without sacrificing any usability. (A weird architecture, based on 1 “Mainvault” and up to two logical vaults, achieved through syncing). But with my current employer there is just no reason to split the data. So i do not see any need to do it right now.

Yes, i think it’s about “what im i comfortable relying on”. To me, it’s highly dependent on control. At no point i had the feeling obsidian was the reason i was not in control of my data. Usually it’s because i fucked up, i was to lazy to properly look for plugins or something different external. And even if obsidian stopped existing… It would just be a tremendous inconvenience, but I’d manage. Just by switching to a random coding environment, i can maintain the core usability until i find an alternative.

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I reached that stage before I used Obsidian. :slightly_smiling_face:

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When I moved my book writing into Obsidian.

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It’s never been “just notes” for me. If I wanted that, I wouldn’t use an app like Obsidian, which offers other features, just to take notes.

Obsidian provides me with the three things I care about most:

  1. Organization of large amounts of information
  2. The ability to cross-reference that information
  3. Relatively clean markdown.

If it stops being any one of those, then it goes in my trash.

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When my vault became a memory engine for my agents.

At first Obsidian was where I kept notes, project history, references, and decisions. Then the important part became less the notes themselves and more the relationships between them: what changed, why a decision was made, which project depended on which concept, and what context an agent should remember before helping me.

So I now treat the vault as a local memory substrate.

The human layer is still plain Markdown. And there is a machine-readable layer of links, entities, project relationships, stale assumptions, conflicts, and summaries that agents can query without ingesting the whole vault every time.

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It did not start with just notes for me, like most here. I am a worldbuilder but also, over time, figured a journal would do me good. First I did my worldbuilding in Notion but I disliked the files not being on my drive and thus found Obsidian. I took my journal from OneNote and bam, I got here ^-^

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