Where your notes actually live

Open your vault in Finder or Explorer. Everything is there, in formats other software can read.

What you made	On disk	Opens in
A note	.md	Any text editor, Obsidian, anything
A task	.md with fields at the top	Same — it’s a note
A canvas	.canvas	Obsidian, or anything reading JSON Canvas
A whiteboard	.excalidraw	excalidraw.com, Obsidian’s plugin
A handwritten page	.ink	Open JSON
Highlights from a PDF	.md in Highlights/	Anything

The only folder Pellet owns is .pellet/ — settings, saved filters, window layout. Delete it and you lose preferences, never notes.

Why this is the whole point

Every notes app eventually asks you to trust that it will still exist in ten years. Pellet’s answer is to make the question not matter.

If Pellet vanished tomorrow, your vault would be a folder of markdown files. You could open it in Obsidian, grep it from a terminal, keep writing in TextEdit, or feed it to whatever comes next. Nothing to export, because nothing was ever locked up.

Your frontmatter is yours

The block at the top of a note between --- lines is frontmatter. Pellet reads the keys it knows and leaves every other key exactly as you wrote it — including ones put there by other tools it’s never heard of. It doesn’t reorder them, reformat them, or quietly drop the ones it doesn’t recognize.

Backing up

Pellet doesn’t back up for you — deliberately, because a folder of plain files works with whatever you already use: Time Machine, a git repository, an external disk, any cloud drive.

It does keep local version history of every save, which is a different thing and not a substitute.