Obsidian export

Kept can copy your vault into an existing Obsidian vault. Useful if you already use Obsidian for notes and want your AI conversations to live in the same graph.

What it does

Settings → Export → Obsidian → Pick a vault. Choose any folder that has a .obsidian/ directory inside it (Kept verifies this before proceeding — it won't write into a folder Obsidian doesn't recognize).

The export creates a Kept/ subdirectory in your Obsidian vault and copies every conversation file into platform subfolders:

~/MyObsidianVault/
├── .obsidian/
├── (your existing notes)
└── Kept/
    ├── chatgpt/
    ├── claude/
    ├── gemini/
    ├── grok/
    └── kimi/

Each conversation appears as a regular markdown note. The YAML frontmatter is preserved. Backlinks, tags, and graph connections work because Obsidian treats them as plain notes.

Re-running the export

Hit Export again later (or enable auto-sync) and Kept reconciles:

• New conversations in the vault → copied into Obsidian
• Updated conversations (more messages since last export) → file is updated
• Files you edited inside Obsidian → preserved. Kept detects user-side edits via content hashing and skips overwriting them.

This isn't full two-way sync — Kept doesn't watch Obsidian for changes and pull them back into the vault. But re-exports won't clobber annotations you've made on the Obsidian side.

Auto-export

Settings → Export → Obsidian → Auto-export. Kept runs the reconciliation on a debounced interval (default: 5 minutes after each new capture, configurable). You can leave it on and forget about it.

Manual export

From the CLI:

kept export obsidian /path/to/your/obsidian/vault

Same reconciliation behavior, useful for scripting.

What gets copied

Everything in ~/.kept/vault/ except:

• Hidden files (.kept-cache/, internal indexing artifacts)
• The digests/ directory by default — opt in via Settings → Export → Include digests

Image attachments inside conversation files come along too. They're copied as-is, with the relative path inside the conversation markdown updated to point to the Obsidian-side location.

What doesn't sync back

If you create a new note inside MyObsidianVault/Kept/... directly (not a Kept-captured conversation), it lives in Obsidian only. It doesn't get copied back to ~/.kept/vault/. Kept's vault is the source-of-truth direction; Obsidian is the consumer.

If you need bidirectional flow — notes you write in Obsidian show up in Kept's index — that's a feature on the roadmap, not in v1.