Three years and roughly 2,400 notes in, the most useful thing I have learned about Obsidian is how much of it not to use.
October 2026
Updated after moving the archive to a yearly folder structure. The plugin count is now four, down from eleven.
Why I Kept Using It
Backlinks. Not the graph view, which I open twice a year, but the backlinks panel. Reading a note together with every note that references it changes what you notice about your own thinking.
My Setup
- One vault for research and one for client work. Not more.
- Four plugins. Templates, Dataview for one index, Excalidraw for diagrams, and Periodic Notes for the weekly log.
- Folders by project, not by topic. Topics are handled by tags. Folders by topic always collapse eventually.
- Yearly archive. Anything untouched for twelve months moves to an archive folder and stays searchable.
What Works Well
- Plain Markdown on disk. Portability is the feature that has mattered most over three years.
- Backlinks and search. Fast even at this size.
- Stability. No forced migrations, no format changes that broke existing notes.
What Does Not
- Plugin gravity. Every plugin is a small maintenance promise. I have removed seven.
- Mobile is usable, not pleasant. Fine for reading and capture, poor for restructuring.
- Configuration as procrastination. The vault became genuinely useful only after I stopped redesigning it.
What works well
- Plain files, complete portability
- Backlinks change how you read your own notes
- Fast search at several thousand notes
- Stable over three years
What does not
- Plugin ecosystem invites over-configuration
- Mobile editing is limited
- No native collaboration
- Graph view is mostly decorative
Who It Is For
Researchers, writers and consultants who think in connected notes and are willing to keep the setup boring. Not for anyone who wants a shared workspace.
Alternatives
Typora for pure writing. Logseq for outliner-first thinking. Notion for shared team knowledge.
Final Verdict
Obsidian survived three years because it stores my words as files and because I eventually stopped tinkering with it. Both conditions were necessary.
