Lou Plummer

Depending on how you use Obsidian, your maintenance tasks may vary, but these are some good general tips. Set these as recurring tasks in your task manager of choice and keep your setup in good shape all the time.

1. Update your plugins

Click on the settings “Gear” icon > Community Plugins > Check for updates button. I also suggest using the community plugin Plugin Update Tracker. You’ll need to do this on every device where you use Obsidian.

2 Update your themes

Click on the settings “Gear” icon > Appearance > Current Community Themes > Check for Updates. Again, you’ll need to do this on every device where you use Obsidian.

3 Organize your folders and notes

If you use a folder system in your vault, you should periodically do some basic file maintenance. I have a couple of folders that serve as Inboxes for me. One is where the mail I forward ends up (How to forward email to your Obsidian vault) and the other is for clipped web pages and the default location where new notes go. I regularly go through those folders and move the notes in them to their permanent home. You can automate part of this process with the Auto Note Mover community plugin. which will relocate notes based on tags. If you use a calendar based scheme for your periodic notes or read it later imports, go ahead and move notes to the appropriate folders during this step.

4. Clean up your tags

One tip I give to anyone getting started with Obsidian is that if you are going to use tags, start using them from the very beginning. My starter vault contained a couple thousand notes I bought over from Evernote and thankfully they were all tagged. I suggest using the Tag Folder community plugin, because one of the things it does is show you all the notes you have without tags. Tag Wrangler is also good to have because it lets you edit and delete tags in bulk. If you need to add the same tags to multiple notes at one, use the Multi Properties plugin.

5. Download and organize attachments

I prefer to download the images in web pages I clip into my vault and I like to keep those images named according to the note they are in. I also like to have a central attachment repository. The two plugins I use for this are Local Images Plus and Attachment Management. I cover the whole workflow in this blog post.

6. Check your backups

There are several ways to back up your Obsidian vault - folder syncing to a secondary location on your hard drive to upload to a cloud service, GitHub or as part of a whole drive backup like Time Machine on a Mac. Regardless of the method you choose, you should check periodically to make sure all your files are getting added.