The most important thing to know: your notes are not stored inside Obsidian. They live in your vault folder on your hard drive. You can uninstall and reinstall the app as many times as you need without losing a single note.
Your notes, images and attachments are stored in the vault folder — a regular folder you chose when you first set up Obsidian. This folder is completely independent of the Obsidian application.
Common vault locations:
C:\Users\You\Documents\MyVault\
~/Documents/MyVault/
iCloud Drive/Obsidian/MyVault/
The Obsidian application itself is installed separately — typically in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Obsidian on Windows or /Applications/Obsidian.app on macOS.
Uninstalling this deletes only the app binary and its cache — never your vault files.
%appdata%\Obsidian. macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian. This resets app settings but does not touch your vault.| Item | Reinstall only | Reinstall + clear config |
|---|---|---|
| Your notes (Markdown files) | ✅ Preserved | ✅ Preserved |
| Vault folder structure | ✅ Preserved | ✅ Preserved |
| Vault-level plugin settings (.obsidian folder) | ✅ Preserved | ✅ Preserved |
| Installed community plugins | ✅ Preserved | ✅ Preserved |
| App-level settings (theme, hotkeys) | ✅ Usually preserved | ⚠️ Reset to default |
| Recently opened vault list | ✅ Usually preserved | ⚠️ Cleared |
| GPU cache (corrupted data) | ✅ Cleared | ✅ Cleared |