Vaults

A vault is any folder. Your notes are .md files, your canvases are .canvas files, and attachments are the images, PDFs and audio files you put next to them. Scaffold never moves your files into a hidden database. If Scaffold disappeared tomorrow, your folder would still be a complete, readable archive.

What is inside a vault

Item	What it is
*.md	Notes, in Markdown. The file name is the note title.
*.canvas	Canvas boards, saved as open JSON Canvas files.
*.base	Saved database-style views, see Properties and Bases.
Everything else	Attachments such as images, audio, video and PDF.
.scaffold/	Scaffold’s own data, described below.

The .scaffold folder

Scaffold keeps its own bookkeeping in a hidden .scaffold folder at the top of the vault:

Path	Purpose
manifest.json, config.json	Vault identity and per-vault settings.
index-cache.json	A cache of the index so large vaults open quickly. Safe to delete; it is rebuilt.
snapshots/	Automatic recovery copies of notes you have edited.
trash/	Files you deleted, restorable from the trash view.
backups/	Backup archives you created.
themes/, snippets/	Your themes and CSS snippets.

Other hidden folders, such as .git, .trash or configuration folders that other tools create, are never read, indexed or modified. A folder that another tool also manages stays exactly as that tool left it.

How saving stays safe

• Atomic writes. A note is written to a temporary file, flushed, then renamed over the original. A crash never leaves half a note.
• Conflict-aware. If a file changed on disk since Scaffold opened it (for example because your sync tool updated it), Scaffold does not overwrite it. It keeps both versions and tells you.
• Recovery snapshots. Before saving, Scaffold keeps a rate-limited copy of the previous version. By default a snapshot is taken at most every five minutes per note, and the latest 50 are kept.
• Delete means trash. Deleting moves the file to .scaffold/trash. It is only removed for good from the trash view.

Vault settings

Settings stored per vault include where new notes are created, where attachments go (default Attachments), whether links are written as [[wikilinks]] or standard Markdown links, whether links are updated when you rename a note (on by default), and folders to exclude from the index.

Backups and several vaults

• Create a backup copy of the vault writes a zip archive. Restoring is non-destructive by default: it extracts into a new Restored backup <timestamp> folder. You can instead choose to overwrite (every replaced file is snapshotted first) or only add missing files.
• Export vault as zip gives you a plain archive of your files.
• Open another vault switches to a different folder. Each vault has its own settings, index and history.

Large vaults

Scaffold builds an in-memory index when you open a vault and updates it from file changes afterwards. Search, backlinks, the graph and tags all read from this index. It is disposable by design: delete .scaffold/index-cache.json and the next open simply rebuilds it from your files.