How to save your Claude conversations to Obsidian as Markdown
Your Claude conversations live behind a login; your Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files. This is how to get one into the other as clean Markdown — no plugin, no API key.
Why the obvious methods don’t stick
Each way people try to bridge Claude and Obsidian has a catch:
| Method | Why it fails |
|---|---|
| Copy-paste | Works for one conversation, not as a habit — and it mangles code blocks, tables, and math the moment the conversation gets interesting. |
| Browser “export” scripts | Built on screen-scraping the page’s HTML instead of the real data, so they break every time the site’s markup changes and tend to turn LaTeX into raw $$ soup. |
| Plugin + local REST API | Install a plugin, run a local server, generate a self-signed certificate, paste in an API key. That’s a lot of setup for “save my chats,” which is why most people never finish. |
All three treat saving as an export you reach for after the fact — by which point you’ve usually lost the ones you didn’t think to save.
What a good setup needs
Four properties:
- It writes plain Markdown into your real vault folder — not a database, not a cloud, not a separate app.
- It keeps fidelity — code fences stay code fences, tables stay tables, math stays math.
- It doesn’t duplicate — re-running it updates the file in place instead of spawning
conversation (3).md. - It doesn’t ask for keys or plugins — an Obsidian vault is already just a folder of Markdown files. Anything that writes Markdown to that folder is “Obsidian support.”
The one people miss
Doing it with Carry
Carry is the browser extension we built to write to that folder directly: point it at the folder Obsidian opens and it saves your Claude conversations as clean Markdown right into your vault — local-only, no account, no API key. It reads Claude through the session you’re already signed into, so code, tables, and LaTeX come through intact and land as notes you can link, tag, and query in Dataview.
Three steps, and the animation below is the whole thing:
Pick your folder
Connect providers
Then it's automatic
Point it at your vault, connect Claude, and your thinking stops living behind a login. If that’s the setup you’ve been meaning to build, the homepage has the rest.
Carry is local-only — no server, no account, and only the providers you connect. It syncs Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok into your own folder as Markdown — see how it works to get started.
Save every conversation.
Sync your ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok conversations into your own folder — as clean Markdown, local-only.