An Obsidian vault that lasts

╶── gemlog · 2026-10-26

Most Obsidian vaults die the same way. Someone installs the app on a Sunday, watches three videos, creates 23 folders, 40 tags and a dashboard with a quote of the day, writes eleven notes and never opens it again. The problem is that it was built to be looked at, and a vault is supposed to be used.

This post is the setup I'd give a friend who wants to start today and still be using the thing in five years. It has a name, mostly so I can refer to it: the House. It has six rooms, a handful of rules and a weekly sweep that takes twenty minutes. Nothing here needs a plugin you have to install.

What Obsidian is

Obsidian is a folder of plain text files with a very good editor on top. Every note is a Markdown file sitting on your disk, readable by any other program, today and in 2045. You can link notes to each other with `[[double brackets]]`, and Obsidian keeps track of who links to whom.

That's the whole deal, and it's why it's worth the trouble. Your notes aren't trapped in somebody's database. It's also free, including for work, since February 2025.

The flip side is that Obsidian gives you nothing to hold on to. No default structure, no "right way," thousands of community plugins and a forum full of people who have spent more time organizing notes than writing them. So you need a few decisions made up front. That's what the House is.

Four tools, one job each

Every organizing system in Obsidian is built from the same four parts: folders, links, tags and properties. Most of the mess people end up with comes from using all four for the same job.

In the House each one does exactly one thing:

• Folders say where a note is in its life. Just arrived, in use, kept for reference, finished.
• Links say what a note is about and what it connects to.
• Properties say what kind of note it is and what state it's in.
• Tags are for things you have to act on. Almost nothing else.

When you hesitate about where something goes, ask which of those four questions you're answering.

Notice that topics don't get folders. That's on purpose. A note about backing up a server belongs to "servers," "backups," "the homelab" and "that time I lost a weekend of photos" all at once. A folder can only pick one, and you'll pick the wrong one half the time. Links can point to all four.

The House

The whole vault looks like this:

00 Door/

10 Desk/

20 Shelf/

30 Diary/

40 Attic/

90 Basement/

Attachments/

Templates/

Bases/

The numbers keep the rooms in the same order in every file browser, on every device. They're not a classification scheme, and you won't need more than these six. If you ever feel the urge to create `50 Something`, read the section about mistakes first.

00 Door

Everything new comes in through the door. A link you want to read, a thought on the bus, a screenshot, half a meeting. You don't decide anything when you capture. You just drop it here.

The rule: the Door gets emptied once a week.

Set Obsidian to create new notes in this folder (Settings, Files and links, "Default location for new notes"). From then on, capturing costs you one shortcut and zero decisions.

10 Desk

Things with a finish line. A trip, a client job, a site you're building, a course you're taking, an essay you're writing. If you can say "this is done" one day, it goes on the Desk.

Each project starts as a single note named after it: `Move to the new server.md`. Tasks, links, decisions and scraps go inside that note, in that order of importance. A project only earns its own folder when it has more than about five notes of its own. Most never will.

When a project is done, or you've given up on it (be honest), it goes to the Attic.

20 Shelf

This is the vault. Everything you want to find again lives here, flat, with no subfolders at all. How to configure a reverse proxy. What you learned from a book. A recipe your aunt makes. Notes about a person, a tool, an idea, a place.

No subfolders sounds scary until you try it. You'll find notes through search (Ctrl+O to jump by title, Ctrl+Shift+F to search inside), through links from other notes, and through Bases views that group the shelf by type. In practice nobody browses a tree of folders to find a note after the first month. They type.

30 Diary

Daily notes, one per day, named `2026-10-26.md`. Turn on the Daily notes core plugin and point it here.

Use them however you like: a log, a journal, a place to dump the day's scraps. The useful habit is linking. When you write about something in the diary, link it: "Spent the afternoon on \[\[Move to the new server\]\]." Months later, that project's backlinks show you every day you touched it, without you ever keeping a log on purpose.

40 Attic

Finished projects, notes you've outgrown, old imports. You move things here, you don't delete them. Search still finds them, links still work, and they stay out of your way.

The Attic is what makes the rest of the House cheap to keep tidy. Archiving costs one drag, so you'll actually do it.

90 Basement

The machinery: images and PDFs in `Attachments`, note templates in `Templates`, your Bases files in `Bases`. You'll rarely open it. Point Obsidian's attachment setting at `90 Basement/Attachments` so pasted images stop landing all over the vault.

Properties: five, no more

Properties are the little block of fields at the top of a note. In the House every note on the Shelf gets the same small set:

\---

type: howto

status: growing

created: 2026-10-26

source: https://example.com/the-article

related:

• "\[\[Homelab\]\]"

\---

Each one has a job.

type says what kind of note this is. Pick from a short fixed list and don't invent new ones on a whim. A list that works for most people: `idea`, `howto`, `reference`, `person`, `book`, `place`, `meeting`, `project`. Ten is the ceiling.

status tracks how finished your thinking is, not the thing itself. `seed` for a rough capture, `growing` for something you're still adding to, `solid` for a note you'd send to a friend. It's the honest answer to "can I trust this note?"

created is the date, written `YYYY-MM-DD`, because that's the only format that sorts correctly and the only one you'll never misread.

source is where it came from: a URL, a book, a person. Your future self will want to check.

related holds the one or two notes this one most belongs with. Body links can go anywhere, this field is for the main connection.

The test for any property you're tempted to add: will you ever sort or filter by it? If not, it's not a property. Write it in the note.

Links do the heavy lifting

The rule for links is simple: link the first time you mention something that has, or deserves, its own note. Don't worry if the note doesn't exist yet. Obsidian shows the link anyway, and an empty link is a reminder that you meant to write about something. A lot of good notes start as a link to nowhere.

Once a subject piles up, give it a hub note: a plain note on the Shelf that introduces the topic in two lines and lists the notes that matter, each with a sentence about why. `Homelab.md`, `Photography.md`, `Writing.md`.

When to create one? When you catch yourself searching for the same five or more notes together. Not before. Hubs made in advance end up as empty tables of contents, and empty tables of contents are how vaults start to feel like chores.

Tags: a short list of verbs

Tags in the House are for things that need you. That's why they read like verbs:

• `#todo` for something you have to do
• `#read` for something you mean to read
• `#ask` for a question you need to put to someone
• `#check` for a fact you're not sure about

When you finish, you remove the tag. A tag that never goes away is pretending to be a property or a topic. Click on a tag in the sidebar and you get a to-do list across the whole vault, for free.

Bases: the dashboard you don't have to maintain

Bases is a core plugin, added in 2025, that shows your notes as a table built from their properties. This is why the House can afford a flat Shelf.

Make two and put them in `90 Basement/Bases`:

• Shelf: every note in `20 Shelf`, grouped by `type`, sorted by `created`. This is your library catalog.
• Growing: every note where `status` is `seed` or `growing`. This is the list of notes that want more of your attention.

Both update themselves. You never edit a dashboard again, and you never have to remember to.

Names

Titles are how you'll find things, so write them the way you'll search for them.

• Use plain words, not codes: `Configure a reverse proxy with Caddy`, not `INFRA-007`.
• Name ideas as claims when you can: `Backups you never restored don't count` tells you more in the search list than `Backups`.
• Name people the way you'd say them out loud.
• Dates go first and in ISO format when the date is the point: `2026-10-26 Call with the accountant`.

You can rename anything later. Obsidian updates every link for you, which is one of the best features nobody mentions.

The weekly sweep

Once a week, put twenty minutes on your calendar. Sunday night is a good slot. In order:

• Empty the Door. For each note: delete it, move it to the Desk if it's a project, or file it on the Shelf with its five properties. If a note is still confusing after a week, it's probably trash.
• Clear the Desk. Anything finished or dead goes to the Attic.
• Clear one tag. Pick `#todo` or `#read` and either do the items or remove the tag.
• Feed one note. Open the Growing base and add something to one note. One is enough.

That's the whole maintenance. No monthly reviews, no quarterly reorganizations. If the sweep starts taking an hour, something upstream is wrong, usually too much going straight to the Shelf without a reason.

Your first hour

If you're starting from nothing, do this, in this order:

• Create the six folders. Copy the names exactly, numbers included.
• Settings, Files and links: new notes go to `00 Door`, attachments go to `90 Basement/Attachments`.
• Turn on the Daily notes core plugin, folder `30 Diary`, date format `YYYY-MM-DD`.
• Turn on Templates, folder `90 Basement/Templates`, and create one template with the five properties.
• Write ten notes about anything you know well. Your job, a hobby, a tool you use every day. Link them to each other where it makes sense.
• Make the Shelf base.

Then stop. Don't install a single community plugin for the first month. Most of what people install in week one fixes problems they don't have yet, and every plugin is something that can break when you update.

If you're moving in from somewhere else

Importing 4,000 notes from Evernote or Notion on day one is the fastest way to bury a new vault. Use the official Importer plugin, but send everything to `40 Attic/Import`. Search will find it whenever you need it. When an old note proves useful, move it to the Shelf and give it properties. After a year, whatever is still in the import folder was never worth sorting.

If you let an AI near your vault

More people now point an assistant at their notes, to summarize, file or search. Plain Markdown files make that easy, and also make mistakes easy. Write the rules down where the assistant will read them: a note in the Basement that explains the six rooms, the five properties and the tag list, and says what it must never do (delete files, rename hubs, write outside the Door). An assistant follows a written structure far better than an implied one.

The mistakes I'd skip

Building the system before the notes. Your structure should come from things you've written, not from things you plan to write.

A folder per topic. It feels tidy for a month. Then a note belongs in two places, you duplicate it, and now there are two versions of the truth.

Tags as topics. `#linux`, `#linuxadmin`, `#Linux`, `#sysadmin`. You know how this ends.

Copying someone's vault. Their vault fits their head. Yours will drift anyway, so start small and let it.

Rebuilding everything every six months. If the House stops fitting, change one rule and live with it for a month. A vault you keep using in a slightly wrong structure beats a perfect one you abandoned.

Why six rooms and not twelve

Every system eventually adds rooms. Resist it. Six is small enough to hold in your head without looking, and it answers the only question a folder should answer: what do I do with this note right now (read it later, work on it, keep it or put it away)?

Everything else, what the note is about, what it connects to, how good it is, lives in links and properties, where it can be more than one thing at once. That's the House. Open the Door and start dropping things in.

──╴ end of transmission

Gemlog

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