A vault is a folder

Obsidian’s help defines a vault as a folder on your local file system where Obsidian stores your notes, and says the notes are Markdown-formatted plain text files. The figure is the whole vault of Whitlock & Marsh Grounds, an invented two-person landscaping firm: eight files, each one a note you can open.

A link between notes is text in the file. Obsidian’s Wikilink format puts a note’s name between double square brackets, and Obsidian generates links in that format by default; it can use Markdown links instead if you turn Wikilinks off. A link can point at a heading by adding a hash and the heading’s text. Home links to five notes this way.

A backlink for a note, in Obsidian’s words, is a link from another note to that note. Its Backlinks plugin shows them as linked mentions. Nobody typed the backlinks in the figure: they are found by reading every note’s text. three notes link to Service area, so those are its backlinks; add a link in one note and another note’s backlinks change.

Obsidian can also rewrite links for you when you rename a note, unless you switch that off. That is the app helping; the links themselves are plain text and survive without it.

To my eye, Claude Code’s own memory has a similar shape. Its docs describe CLAUDE.md files as Markdown files of persistent instructions that Claude reads at the start of every session, and they can pull in other files with an @path import.

My viewMy reading: because the memory is files and links in a folder, anything that can read files can read it, with no integration to build. The next chapter is about making an agent actually do the reading, because a folder nobody opens is not memory.