How to Uninstall Obsidian From Your Mac (Without Losing Your Vault)

Obsidian is unusual among note-taking apps in that your data lives in plain Markdown files inside a folder you chose — not in a database hidden in ~/Library. That makes uninstalling refreshingly safe: you can remove the app completely and your notes are untouched. They’re just .md files in whatever folder you set up as your vault.

What people get wrong is the difference between the app and the vault. Removing the app is easy. Forgetting where your vault lives, then losing track of it, is a nightmare. Here’s how to uninstall Obsidian on macOS Sonoma 14 and Sequoia 15 — keeping your notes safe and clearing every leftover the app drops.

Find your vault first (don’t skip this)

Open Obsidian. Click the vault selector (top-left, the small house/folder icon). For each vault listed, hover and you’ll see the full path on disk. Common locations:

• ~/Documents/Obsidian Vault/ — the default name when you create a new vault
• ~/iCloud Drive/Obsidian/ — if you set up iCloud sync
• ~/Documents/Notes/ or similar — if you opened an existing folder of Markdown files

Write down the path of each vault before you uninstall. Or just open Finder, navigate to each vault, and hit Cmd+I to confirm the location.

If you’ve been using Obsidian Sync (the paid service), your vault is also in Obsidian’s cloud — but the local copy is the source of truth, so it still matters.

Quit Obsidian

Cmd+Q, or from the menu bar. Activity Monitor → search “Obsidian” → force-quit anything left.

Obsidian uses Electron, so you’ll see one or two helper processes alongside the main app. They should all quit together.

Drag Obsidian to the Trash

Open Finder → Applications. Drag Obsidian to the Trash. The app bundle is around 200 MB.

This removes the application binary. Your vaults are untouched — they’re in ~/Documents/ or wherever you put them, not inside the app bundle.

Where Obsidian stores app data

Obsidian’s bundle ID is md.obsidian. The app data is small compared to most Electron apps because the heavy stuff (your notes) is in your vault.

• ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/ — global settings, vault list, recent files, log files
• ~/Library/Caches/md.obsidian/ — image preview cache
• ~/Library/Caches/md.obsidian.ShipIt/ — Squirrel auto-updater
• ~/Library/Preferences/md.obsidian.plist — preferences
• ~/Library/Saved Application State/md.obsidian.savedState/ — window state
• ~/Library/Cookies/md.obsidian.binarycookies — cookies for the catalyst auth flow
• ~/Library/HTTPStorages/md.obsidian/ — modern web storage
• ~/Library/Logs/Obsidian/ — diagnostic logs

Open Finder, Shift+Cmd+G, paste each, delete what’s there.

The big folder here is usually ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/ — typically 50–200 MB. Unlike Notion or Slack, Obsidian doesn’t cache page content here because the content is already on disk in your vault.

Per-vault settings (the .obsidian folder)

This is the part most uninstall guides forget. Each Obsidian vault has its own hidden .obsidian/ folder inside it, containing:

• Plugin installations and their configs (plugins/)
• Theme files (themes/)
• Workspace layout (which panels were open, where)
• Hotkey customizations
• Graph view settings
• App settings specific to that vault (app.json, appearance.json)
• Cached community plugin list

If you’re uninstalling Obsidian entirely and never coming back, you can delete each vault’s .obsidian/ folder to clean up plugin binaries and themes. To find them:

find ~ -name ".obsidian" -type d 2>/dev/null

This searches your home folder for every .obsidian directory and prints the path. Each one is inside a vault. If you want to keep your notes but clear plugin clutter, delete just the .obsidian/plugins/ and .obsidian/themes/ subfolders.

If you’re keeping the option to reinstall later, leave .obsidian/ alone — it’s how Obsidian remembers your setup.

Skip the manual huntSweep finds every leftover preference, cache, and support file in seconds. Download Sweep free →

Login items

Obsidian doesn’t add itself to login items by default, but if you toggled “Open at login” in settings, the entry needs cleanup:

1. System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions.
2. Look for Obsidian under “Open at Login” — remove if present.

That’s it. Obsidian doesn’t run as a background agent, so there’s no “Allow in the Background” entry to worry about.

Keychain entries

Obsidian uses the Keychain only if you’ve signed up for Obsidian Sync or Obsidian Publish (the paid services). If you have:

1. Open Keychain Access.
2. Search “Obsidian.”
3. Delete the matching entries.

If you’ve never signed in to a paid Obsidian account, there’s nothing to remove here. The app works fully locally for free users.

URL handler

Obsidian registers itself as the handler for obsidian:// links — these are used to deep-link into specific notes from external apps. After uninstall, this registration lingers.

If you don’t care about deep links, ignore it. If obsidian:// URLs are throwing errors after uninstall, rebuild Launch Services:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

This is harmless but takes 30 seconds.

Empty the Trash

Empty the Trash. Recovered space is modest — usually 200–400 MB total, since Obsidian’s footprint is small. The win here isn’t disk space, it’s a cleaner ~/Library.

Don’t dig through ~/Library yourselfSweep hunts down every leftover an uninstaller misses. Free download for Mac →

Confirm your vault is intact

Open Finder, navigate to your vault location (e.g., ~/Documents/Obsidian Vault/), and verify the .md files are all there. They should be.

Open one in TextEdit or any other text editor — your notes are plain Markdown and readable in any app. This is the whole reason Obsidian is so trustworthy as a notes platform: your data isn’t locked in a proprietary format.

Manual vs. Sweep

For Obsidian specifically, manual removal is genuinely simple — eight paths in ~/Library and you’re done. The risk isn’t missing files; it’s accidentally deleting your vault folder, which Sweep won’t touch because it lives in ~/Documents/, not ~/Library/.

Where Sweep wins is when you have multiple Electron apps you’ve tried and abandoned — Obsidian, Logseq, Roam Helper, Bear, Craft, etc. Cleaning up after each one manually is repetitive. Sweep batches the work.

Reinstalling later

If you reinstall Obsidian, point it at your existing vault folder when it asks “Open folder as vault.” The .obsidian/ directory inside your vault has all your plugins, themes, and settings — they’ll restore automatically. No need to set everything up again from scratch, as long as you didn’t delete the per-vault settings folder.

If you did delete .obsidian/ and want a clean slate, that’s also valid — Obsidian will create a fresh one with default settings and let you reinstall plugins from the community list.

Either way: your notes stay, the app comes back, and the only thing you lose is the disk space the old caches were taking up. Which was the point.