- obsidian is a free notetaking app where your notes are plain text files stored on your own machine. - an obsidian “workspace” is called a `vault`; a vault is just a folder on your pc. - a note written in obsidian is a [[markdown guide|markdown]] file (stored in your vault) that can be opened by any text editor, including notepad and word, meaning that you never rely on obsidian itself to use your information. as long as you have access to your computer, you can access your files. see [[{4.1b2a1} file over app]]. - this is in contrast to other popular notetaking or “pkm” apps where notes are stored in a proprietary format on company-owned servers. you can usually export a copy of your data, but it’s often incomplete harder to use in other software.