Obsidian Vault Deep Dive: 18 Months and 4,200 Notes

TL;DR: I have used Obsidian as my personal note-taking and research vault for 18 months ending April 30, 2026. Vault size: 4,217 notes, 38,400 internal links, 92 MB of plain Markdown text plus 1.4 GB of images and PDF attachments. Plugins: 14 active community plugins plus 4 core plugins enabled. Sync: I use Obsidian Sync at $4 per month, after one bad month of trying to roll my own Git sync. The plugin stack and the folder structure are what make or break Obsidian. Worth using as a primary note-taking tool if you value local-first and Markdown; skip it if you need team collaboration or your notes live with other people's edits.

Jump To

• How We Tested
• Vault Structure
• Daily Use
• Performance and Cost
• Pros and Cons
• Who This Is For
• Bottom Line

How We Tested

Period: November 1, 2024 through April 30, 2026 (18 months). Devices used: MacBook Pro M3 daily, iPhone 15 daily (mobile app), iPad Mini occasionally for reading, Windows desktop for one quarter when traveling. Vault history: started with 240 imported Notion pages converted to Markdown via the Obsidian Importer community plugin in November 2024. Grew organically from there. Tracked metrics across the period: note count over time (logged monthly), plugin churn (added vs removed), sync incidents, time spent in Obsidian per day (via the Time Tracker plugin), daily-use friction logged in a separate Obsidian note. I also kept comparison notes during two trial periods: Logseq for 14 days in February 2025, and Reflect for 7 days in October 2025. Bias caveats: I am a single user with technical comfort. I am willing to write small scripts to bend the tool. A non-technical user's experience will differ on the plugin side.

Vault Structure

The folder structure I settled on by month 6 and have kept since. Four top-level folders. _Daily for daily notes (one per day, automatic creation via the Daily Notes core plugin, date-stamped filename like 2026-04-22.md). _People for one note per person I interact with in any meaningful way (321 notes; first name plus last name in the title). _Projects for one note per ongoing project (44 notes; title is the project name in title case). _References for source material, articles I have read, quotes I want to keep (3,812 notes; this folder is the biggest). All four folders have a leading low-dash so they sort to the top in the file explorer. No deeper nesting. Links replace folders for navigation. A reference note about a book will link to the People note for the author, will link to the Project note for whatever project that book is informing, and will be backlinked from the Daily note where I logged reading it. This is the actual unlock with Obsidian: links instead of folders. Took me about 3 months to stop reaching for nested folders out of habit.

The plugin stack that survived 18 months. Core plugins on: Daily notes, Templates, Outgoing links, Backlinks, Tag pane, Outline, Word count, Workspaces, File recovery, Audio recorder. Core plugins off: Page preview (felt distracting), Slash commands (use markdown shortcuts instead), Slides (rarely needed), Web viewer (use the OS browser). Community plugins: Calendar (for jumping between Daily notes), Dataview (for queries like all unread book notes), Templater (for richer template logic than core), Periodic Notes (weekly and monthly auto-creation), Quick Switcher++ (faster than the built-in switcher), Style Settings (theme tweaks), Better Word Count (tracks daily writing volume), Excalidraw (for sketching diagrams I cannot draw in Markdown), Outliner (for collapsing long lists), Hover Editor (for inline editing on hover), Linter (auto-fixes Markdown formatting on save), Tasks (for true to-do management across the vault), Iconize (icons in the file explorer for visual scanning), Advanced Tables (because Markdown table editing is otherwise painful). 14 active. Removed over time: Dataview Calendars, Mind Map, Smart Connections (AI), Surfing (in-vault browser). Plugin churn is real; budget time for it.

Daily Use

A typical day. Morning: Cmd-O opens today's Daily note (created automatically). Read yesterday's note for context. Add a top section called Plan with 3 to 5 bullets of what I will work on. As the day progresses, I add notes inline: a phone call link to the person, a research excerpt link to the reference, a task link to the project. By evening, the Daily note is a timeline of where I spent time and what I produced. End of day: I review the note, archive what is done, and let the auto-link plugin update backlinks. The Linter plugin keeps everything consistently formatted on save. Reading workflow: read articles in Readwise, highlight as I go, the Readwise integration pulls highlights into Obsidian under _References with backlinks to the source. About 3,000 of my 3,812 reference notes came in via this loop. Writing workflow: longer pieces (like this blog post) start as a Daily note bullet, become a Project note, then move into a draft file. Word count plugin tracks daily writing volume; I averaged 720 words a day across the 18 months, peak week 4,200 words.

Mobile use. The iOS app is good for capture (a quick note, a voice memo, a photo with OCR), less good for editing long notes (the keyboard handling around link autocomplete is finicky). Sync via Obsidian Sync is fast: a note I write on iPhone shows up on my Mac within 4 seconds typically. The sync incident I mentioned. In December 2024 I tried to roll my own sync using a private Git repo plus the Obsidian Git community plugin. Setup looked clean. Worked for 9 days. Then a merge conflict between iPhone-edited and Mac-edited versions of the same Daily note silently lost about 800 words of content from one branch. Spent 3 days reconstructing from manual backups. Switched to official Obsidian Sync at $4 per month. No data loss since. The takeaway: official sync is worth it for a single-user vault unless you are extremely careful with Git timing across devices. Plugin community: very active. About once a month a plugin I depend on gets an update that breaks something subtle. I keep a list of plugin versions I trust and update slowly.

• Win: local-first Markdown survives any vendor and stays under my control
• Win: links over folders changed how I retrieve information after 6 months
• Win: Readwise integration pulls highlights into the vault automatically
• Win: Daily Notes plus Periodic Notes makes time-based navigation natural
• Gripe: Obsidian Git plus iPhone is a recipe for silent data loss

Performance and Cost

Performance at 4,200 notes. Vault open time on Mac: 1.8 seconds with 14 community plugins loaded. File switcher (Cmd-O): instant. Search across the whole vault for a phrase: typically under 400 ms. Graph view: takes 2.5 to 4 seconds to render the full vault graph; I rarely use it for daily work but it makes a great Friday afternoon procrastination tool. Backlinks panel: instant. Outline panel: instant. Dataview query (all unread book notes from References): 80 to 200 ms depending on complexity. Plugin overhead is real; my CPU sits at 1 to 3 percent idle with Obsidian open. With the Tasks plugin scanning the vault for due dates, CPU briefly spikes to 8 percent on save. Memory footprint: 380 to 520 MB depending on plugin set. Cost over 18 months. Obsidian itself is free for personal use. Commercial use license is $50 per user one time (I bought it in November 2024). Obsidian Sync: $4 per month or $48 per year (paid annually $40). Obsidian Publish: I do not use this; would be $8 per month if I wanted to publish notes publicly. Total spent: $50 license plus 18 months of Sync at $4 each ($72) equals $122 over 18 months.

Pros and Cons

• Pro: Markdown files on disk are the most portable note format in 2026
• Pro: links over folders, after 3 months, retrieves information faster than search
• Pro: rich community plugin ecosystem covers most workflows
• Pro: commercial-license model is one-time $50; no ongoing fee for the core app
• Con: sync requires either paid Obsidian Sync or careful self-hosted alternatives
• Con: plugin churn is real and dependencies on specific plugins can break with updates
• Con: mobile is good for capture, weaker for editing long notes
• Con: not collaborative; one user per vault is the design assumption

Who This Is For

Pick Obsidian if you take many notes, you value local-first ownership, you want Markdown that outlives any vendor, and you are willing to invest in a folder and link structure that compounds over months. Pick Obsidian if you read heavily and want a long-term reference library that you can search and link. Pick Obsidian if you are comfortable installing and managing 10 to 20 community plugins. Skip Obsidian if you need collaborative editing or shared team knowledge; Notion or Confluence are built for that and Obsidian is not. Skip Obsidian if you mainly use mobile to write long notes; the mobile editing experience is the weakest part. Skip Obsidian if plugin churn frustrates you; the ecosystem moves and you will spend time on it. Skip Obsidian if you only have a few dozen notes; Apple Notes or Bear will give you the same value with less setup.

Links over folders is not a feature, it is a habit you build over 3 months. After that, Obsidian retrieves things faster than your memory.

Bottom Line

Eighteen months in, Obsidian is my primary knowledge tool and the one tool I would copy to a new computer first. The single biggest lesson: stop trying to roll your own sync and pay the $4 a month for Obsidian Sync. The second biggest: the value compounds. The first 6 months felt like organising; the next 12 felt like reaping. The honest concern: Obsidian is a one-person tool, and most knowledge work in 2026 is collaborative. I use Notion for the team and Obsidian for myself. The two coexist fine if you keep the boundaries clean. If you are starting fresh and curious whether Obsidian is for you, give it 90 days. Build the four-folder structure, add 8 to 10 community plugins, write daily for 90 days. By day 90 you will know. Got a vault setup question? Drop me a note. I will share my four-folder template and the plugin export that survived 18 months.