How to export an Obsidian vault (and what travels)

TL;DR. An Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files, attachments, and a hidden config folder. To export it, you package the folder — zip it or copy it. The Markdown, images, and structure travel anywhere. Plugins, Canvas, and the graph view don’t, because they were never content. To bring a vault into a team wiki, zip it and import; Raccoon Page reads an Obsidian vault on every plan, including Free.

Obsidian is the rare app where “export” is almost a trick question. There is no big blue button, and that’s the good news. Your vault is already sitting on your disk as plain files, which means exporting it is mostly a matter of deciding what you want to take and where you want to take it.

To export an Obsidian vault, you copy or zip the vault folder. That’s the whole answer for the common case. A vault is a directory of Markdown notes, the attachments you’ve dropped in, your subfolders, and a hidden .obsidian config folder. The text and the structure are portable. The app-specific bits are not. The interesting part of this post is knowing which is which before you move anything.

We’ll cover what a vault actually contains, what travels and what doesn’t, how to package one cleanly, and what to do when one person’s solo vault becomes a thing a whole team needs to read.

A vault is a folder, not a database

Most note apps store your writing in a proprietary blob you can only get at through their export menu. Obsidian doesn’t. A vault is a plain folder on your filesystem, and every note is a .md file you could open in any text editor on earth.

Open one in Finder or Explorer and you’ll see exactly what’s there: Markdown files, your subfolders arranged however you arranged them, an attachments folder (or wherever you told images to land), and a hidden .obsidian folder. Obsidian’s own documentation on how it stores data confirms the shape: your content is files, and the app reads those files rather than locking them away.

This is the single most useful fact about exporting. There’s nothing to extract. The vault folder is the export. Back it up by copying it; share it by zipping it; move it to a new machine by dragging it across. The notes don’t know they moved.

What travels and what stays behind

Here’s the part people get wrong. “My vault” feels like one thing, so it feels like all of it should move together. It doesn’t. Some of what you see in Obsidian is your knowledge, and some of it is the app dressed up to look like your knowledge.

What travels, because it’s plain content:

• Markdown text. Every note, exactly as written. Headings, lists, tables, code fences, bold, links.
• Attachments. Images, PDFs, and anything else you embedded, as long as the files are inside the vault folder.
• Folder structure. Your subfolders and where each note lives in them.
• Standard Markdown links. Relative links between notes survive as long as the whole folder moves together.

What stays behind, because it was never content:

• Plugins. Community plugins live in .obsidian/plugins. They’re code, not notes. A Dataview query is live in Obsidian and inert plain text everywhere else.
• Canvas. Obsidian Canvas files use a non-standard .canvas JSON format. They don’t render as Markdown anywhere but Obsidian.
• The graph view. The graph is computed from your links at runtime. There’s no file to export — it’s a visualization, not a document.
• Plugin-specific syntax. Anything between {{ }} from a templating plugin, or a dataview code block, is text another app reads literally.

The rule of thumb: if you could read it in Notepad and understand it, it travels. If it only makes sense because a plugin is interpreting it, it’s going to need a translation step. (If you’ve ever watched a Dataview table turn into a wall of raw query syntax in a different app, you’ve met this rule the hard way.)

One item sits in the middle: [[wikilinks]]. The double-bracket link is Obsidian-flavoured Markdown, not the standard kind — a plain Markdown reader shows the brackets literally. If your destination reads only standard links, either turn off Use Wikilinks in Obsidian’s Files & Links settings before you write more, or bulk-convert the vault with a community plugin like Link Converter before the move. Or pick a destination that does the translation for you — Raccoon Page’s Obsidian importer resolves wikilinks into real internal page links during import, so the double brackets arrive as working links, not punctuation.

How to package and share a vault, step by step

Whether you’re backing up, moving machines, or handing the vault to someone else, the mechanics are the same. Package the folder, decide what to strip, send it on.

1. Close Obsidian first. Or at least stop editing. You want a clean snapshot, not a folder mid-write.
2. Find the vault folder. In Obsidian, open the vault switcher and note the path. That folder is everything.
3. Decide whether to include .obsidian. Keep it if you’re moving to another machine and want your settings and plugins back. Drop it if you’re sharing the content with someone who doesn’t need your hotkeys.
4. Check your attachments are inside the vault. If you linked images from outside the folder, they won’t be in the zip. Move them in first.
5. Zip the folder. Right-click, compress. One .zip now holds your notes, attachments, and structure.
6. Send or store it. Drop it on a drive, push it to a Git repo, or upload it to whatever’s reading it next.
7. Spot-check the other side. Open a few notes in the destination. Confirm images resolve and links still point where they should.

That’s a backup, a move, and a share — same seven steps. For an actual backup discipline, a lot of people skip the zip and keep the vault in a Git repository, committing as they go. Plain files plus version control is a tidy combination, and it gives you a history without a single plugin.

When one person’s vault becomes the team’s problem

Here’s the story. A solo engineer keeps a beautiful Obsidian vault — runbooks, architecture notes, the reasoning behind every weird decision. Then two people join. Then four. Suddenly the most valuable documentation in the company lives on one person’s laptop, in an app exactly one person can edit at a time.

This is the wall every solo Obsidian vault eventually hits, and it has a name in our shop. Obsidian doesn’t multiplayer. There’s no live presence, no two cursors in the same note, no “someone is editing this right now.” For one person that’s not a limitation, it’s the point. For a team it’s a bottleneck wearing a turtleneck.

That’s the moment to bring the vault somewhere built for more than one set of paws. Real-time co-editing — live cursors, instant sync, no merge conflicts — is what a team needs and what a single-player vault structurally can’t give them. In Raccoon Page that’s on the Team and Business plans, because that’s the point where it earns its keep. (Our CTO, Bandit, calls real-time sync “quantum.” He calls a lot of things quantum. We’ve stopped correcting him.)

Moving the vault in is the easy part. Zip the folder, upload it, and the Obsidian importer reads it — Markdown, attachments, and folder hierarchy preserved. Obsidian import is on every plan, including Free, because importing your own notes shouldn’t be the thing you pay for. Most wikis import in under ten minutes. If you’re weighing the move more broadly, our Obsidian vs Notion comparison walks the two shapes side by side.

You’re never locked in — on either end

The reason any of this works is that Markdown is the lingua franca, and we treat it like one in both directions. Your Obsidian vault comes in as Markdown. And whatever you write afterward goes back out the same way.

This is the opinion the rest of the post stands behind: you’re never locked in, and the proof is the export. A wiki that can only let your data out as a PDF or a “talk to sales” form has decided your knowledge is a bargaining chip. We disagree, with a number. Raccoon Page exports every space as a per-space zip of Obsidian-compatible Markdown, on every plan, with frontmatter preserved and attachments included. The vault you imported is a vault you can take right back out. Same file shape, same portability, no hostage situation.

Sub-second loads. Keyboard-first. The wiki adds the things a folder of files can’t — typo-tolerant search, a real activity feed, permissions you can target — but it never adds a lock. The data stays in the one format that outlives every app that touches it.

When to just stay on Obsidian

Honesty section, because the brand voice requires it and the advice is real. If you’re a solo writer, you probably shouldn’t move at all.

A team wiki solves team problems: multiplayer editing, shared search, who-changed-what, onboarding a new person without a knowledge transfer ceremony. A solo Obsidian vault has none of those problems, so it doesn’t need a tool that solves them. Obsidian is fast, local, offline by default, and yours. For one person, that’s a hard combination to beat, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.

The signal that it’s time isn’t “more notes.” It’s “more people who need the notes.” When the second person asks where the runbook lives, and the answer is “let me export my vault and send it to you,” you’ve outgrown solo. Until then, stay. Zip the folder for backups and get on with your day. The Free plan — three users, one space, a hundred pages, no card — is there for the day the team shows up, and not a day before.

Things people actually ask

How do I export an Obsidian vault? You mostly don’t export it — you copy the vault folder. An Obsidian vault is a normal folder of Markdown files, attachments, and subfolders on your disk. To export it, zip that folder or copy it somewhere else. There is no special export button because the vault is already plain files.

What’s inside an Obsidian vault? Plain-text Markdown notes, the attachments you’ve dropped in, your folder structure, and a hidden .obsidian config folder holding settings, themes, plugins, and workspace state. The notes and attachments are the content. The .obsidian folder is the app, not your knowledge.

Does everything travel when I move a vault? The Markdown text, attachments, and folder hierarchy travel anywhere that reads Markdown. Installed plugins, the graph view, Canvas files, and plugin-specific syntax do not travel as content. A Dataview query is plain text in another app, not a live table. Canvas is a non-standard JSON file.

How do I back up an Obsidian vault? Copy or zip the vault folder to a second location — an external drive, a cloud sync folder, or a Git repository. Because it’s plain files, any backup tool works. Many people keep their vault in a Git repo and commit changes, which gives version history for free.

Can I open an exported Obsidian vault in another app? Yes, if the app reads Markdown. The notes are standard Markdown, so any Markdown editor, static-site generator, or wiki with a Markdown importer can read them. Wiki-links and plugin syntax may need conversion, but the text and structure come across.

How do I import an Obsidian vault into a team wiki? Zip the vault folder and upload it to a wiki that has an Obsidian importer. Raccoon Page imports an Obsidian vault on every plan, including Free — drop in the .zip or the extracted folder. Folder hierarchy and images are preserved, and most wikis import in under ten minutes.

Does Obsidian have a built-in export? Obsidian can export a single note to PDF, and community plugins add other export targets. But for the whole vault there is no single export command, because the vault folder is already the export. Copy the folder and you have it.

Will my links break when I move the vault? Internal links between notes survive as long as the relative folder structure stays intact, which it does when you copy or zip the whole vault. Links break when you move individual notes out of context. Move the whole folder, not pieces of it.

Do wikilinks survive when I export an Obsidian vault? The [[wikilink]] syntax is Obsidian-flavoured Markdown, not the standard kind, so a plain Markdown reader shows it as literal brackets. Three fixes: turn off Use Wikilinks in Obsidian’s Files & Links settings so new links use standard syntax, bulk-convert with a community plugin like Link Converter before you move, or import into a tool that resolves wikilinks itself. Raccoon Page’s Obsidian importer resolves wikilinks into real internal page links during import.

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Exporting an Obsidian vault is the easiest migration you’ll ever do, because the export already happened the day you saved your first note. Copy the folder and you have a backup. Zip it and you have a share. Upload it and you have a team wiki that reads it in under ten minutes and hands it back the same way whenever you ask. The folder was always yours. We just make it readable by more than one raccoon at a time.