What is Obsidian?
Obsidian is a localy hosted knowledge management and note linking application. At its core, it is a Markdown editor that stores notes as plain text files on your machine, not in the cloud by default.
If your not properly documenting you are doing OSINT wrong!
In OSINT, documentation isn’t some boring admin task, it is the work. If you don’t write things down with sources and timestamps, you’re going to forget details, mix things up, or end up re-doing the same research weeks later. Obsidian makes this way easier because it lowers the friction to actually documenting as you go. With templates, you can spin up the same clean note structure every time for a person, username, domain, or event, so you’re not constantly reinventing how you take notes. This really shines for OPSEC stuff like tracking sock puppet accounts. Instead of half remembering which burner was used where, you can keep a dedicated note per persona with creation info, platforms used, posting habits, recovery details, all linked and easy to use later. It helps prevent dumb mistakes, keeps personas from bleeding into each other, and saves a ton of time you’d otherwise waste second guessing yourself or retracing steps you already took.
It can be downloaded at the offical Obsidian website for free and is avalible on Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile.
Key Characteristics
Plugins
If your too lazy to get started you can get your templates on github and there are tons of youtube videos on the basics and how to further utilize obsidian for OSINT.
Obsidian is a localy hosted knowledge management and note linking application. At its core, it is a Markdown editor that stores notes as plain text files on your machine, not in the cloud by default.
If your not properly documenting you are doing OSINT wrong!
In OSINT, documentation isn’t some boring admin task, it is the work. If you don’t write things down with sources and timestamps, you’re going to forget details, mix things up, or end up re-doing the same research weeks later. Obsidian makes this way easier because it lowers the friction to actually documenting as you go. With templates, you can spin up the same clean note structure every time for a person, username, domain, or event, so you’re not constantly reinventing how you take notes. This really shines for OPSEC stuff like tracking sock puppet accounts. Instead of half remembering which burner was used where, you can keep a dedicated note per persona with creation info, platforms used, posting habits, recovery details, all linked and easy to use later. It helps prevent dumb mistakes, keeps personas from bleeding into each other, and saves a ton of time you’d otherwise waste second guessing yourself or retracing steps you already took.
It can be downloaded at the offical Obsidian website for free and is avalible on Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile.
Key Characteristics
- Local storage (offline, private, user-controlled this is where Notion fails)
- Markdown (.md) files that are portable and future-proof
- Bi-directional links and backlinks
- Graph view for built-in MindMap features
- Custom plugins
- Structure is user-designed
- Can use templates for efficiency
- Keep track of Sock Puppet accounts for Opsec
Plugins
- Templater (Allows uses of templates)
- Dataview (Allows for querys like a datbase)
- Backlinks in Document (Shows you every connection in context)
- Obsidian Leaflet (Track physical locations tied to accounts, servers, meetups)
If your too lazy to get started you can get your templates on github and there are tons of youtube videos on the basics and how to further utilize obsidian for OSINT.
![[Image: zMpMcDB.png]](https://i.imgur.com/zMpMcDB.png)