Choose your vault

The first thing Pellet asks for is a vault — the folder your notes live in. That’s all a vault is. Not a database, not an account, not a special file format. A folder.

Picking one

You can point Pellet at:

• A new empty folder. Cleanest start. Make one wherever you keep documents.
• A folder you already have notes in. Pellet reads any .md files it finds.
• An existing Obsidian vault. It opens as-is — see Moving in from Obsidian.

If you’d rather look around before committing anything real, make an empty folder and point Pellet at that.

Where to put it

Somewhere you already back up. Pellet doesn’t back anything up for you — that’s deliberate, because it means your notes work with whatever you already use: Time Machine, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, a git repository, an external disk.

One thing to avoid

Don’t put a vault inside a folder that another app actively rewrites — a Dropbox folder is fine, but a folder that a sync client is constantly reorganizing can confuse any app watching for file changes. If you want Pellet on more than one device, its own sync is the safer route.

What Pellet adds to the folder

One directory, .pellet/, holding your settings, saved filters and window layout. Everything else in the vault is yours — notes, tasks, images, PDFs, whatever you put there.

Delete .pellet/ and you lose preferences. You never lose notes.

Changing your mind

You can open another vault at any time — from Settings, or the Vaults button in the left rail. On desktop it opens in its own window, and the vault you were in stays exactly as it was. On a phone or tablet there’s one window, so it switches in place.

The switcher lists the vaults this device knows about. Each row gives the vault’s name, where its files actually are underneath, and when you last opened it — so you’re never picking between two folders called Notes and hoping. Renaming a row changes only the name shown here; it doesn’t touch the folder on disk. Creating a new vault tells you exactly where it’s about to go before it makes anything.

Each window is one vault, and everything belongs to that vault: its settings, its saved filters, its own Settings window, and — if you use it — its own local API on its own port. There is no “current vault” that things quietly follow, so what you see in Settings is always the settings of the vault in front of you.

Two things are shared across every vault, because they are about the computer rather than the notes: the sync relay if you host one, and signing in to Google — only one vault can be doing that at a time.

Closing a vault’s window closes that vault, including its Settings window and any documents you tore off from it. Reopening Pellet brings back the vaults you had open.