My Obsidian Setup in 2025

I’m a long-term user of Obsidian, and I too have settled on the PARA setup, which is simple and elegant. I don’t bother with any of the graph-linking stuff that, e.g., Roam / Zettelkasten popularised. Instead, I think of search as the main interface. Even writing every day, a single person would struggle to generate enough output to need anything more than Omnisearch (and the latent filtering provided by the PARA folder structure) to make sense of their entire vault. I’ve got seven years of notes in a single vault and it’s fine. Since they’re all markdown files, you can of course run more sophisticated approaches alongside, external to Obsidian - e.g., Houdahspot desktop search, or your own embedding-based semantic setup.

The only other thing I’d add is that I vastly prefer the paid sync option to “roll-your-own” with either Syncthing or iCloud. I’ve found it much more reliable and am happy to pay a flat fee every month to support the company, given their embrace of portable markdown.

Just my 2c, anyway.