okayy little post about how to use obsidian
here is a link to the website and a link to the official help guide. if you want more help there is some yapping below
it's sort of like a markdown file viewer. the files themselves live in your system and are stored locally, obsidian is sort of like a gui to view and edit them
this is what my files look like on macos. obsidian has its own folder where my vaults live (a vault is just where your notes go), and those vaults have my notes as .md files. .md files are just markdown
this means that if obsidian theoretically stopped working or went down, you would still have all of your files in markdown! you could easily edit them with any other markdown editor (including any native apps your device has)
does it sync information?
it doesn't automatically sync information, no. BUT there's a few ways you can get it to sync. here is a guide from the website itself. how i sync it is by storing my vaults in my icloud drive, so they're accessible from any device of mine that uses icloud. you could also use things like google drive or onedrive. obsidian has its own sync, although it's not free. there are a few other methods that i frankly don't know much about
do note that obsidian finds your files based on their full path (e.g. what folders they're in), so if you move your vault around, you'll have to help obsidian find it again.
that's great, because obsidian has a shit ton of settings and community-made plug-ins to customize it and make it do more! you can do things like create css snippets (files that tell obsidian how to style itself), download plug-ins (which change how obsidian works), and probably more that i don't know. the files themselves will be unchanged, this just changes how obsidian renders them.
how can i use it to track my system?
if you want to figure out how to use obsidian itself, there is a big-ass guide here. there are a lot of things you can use to help further organize your information, like properties (things you can add to files, like Simply Plural's custom fields) and bases (a way to view files and their properties -- if you've used notion, these might feel a little familiar). it also has templates so you could use those to more easily create files for members.
i also made an example vault here. to view it in obsidian, download it, open the zip file as a folder, select open folder as vault, and select the folder you just downloaded. it uses no community plug-ins or any other extra stuff
Edit: we use the Notebook Navigator plug-in extensively and personally recommend it if you don't really like the way the built-in file explorer works
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