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Connect Obsidian to your AI tools with Vaulken and S3

Your Obsidian vault is full of valuable notes: meeting notes, project docs, research, ideas. What if your AI assistant could read, search, and reference them directly?

With Vaulken and an S3 sync plugin, you can connect your Obsidian vault to any MCP-compatible AI tool (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf) in under five minutes.

What you'll need

  • An Obsidian vault with notes you want to make accessible to AI
  • A Vaulken account (sign up free)

Step 1: Create a vault

Log in to your Vaulken dashboard and create a vault. You have two options:

Option A: Managed storage (recommended)

  1. Click New vault
  2. Choose Managed: Vaulken provisions S3 storage for you
  3. Enter a name and click Create vault
  4. Copy the credentials shown (endpoint, region, bucket, access key, secret key). You'll need them for Remotely Save

Option B: Bring your own bucket (BYOB)

If you already have an S3 bucket:

  1. Click New vault
  2. Choose BYOB
  3. Enter your S3 connection details: endpoint, region, bucket, access key, secret key
  4. Click Create vault

Step 2: Sync Obsidian to S3

The Remotely Save plugin syncs your Obsidian vault to S3-compatible storage.

Install the plugin

  1. Open Obsidian → Settings → Community Plugins → Browse
  2. Search for Remotely Save
  3. Install and enable

Configure S3

  1. Go to Remotely Save settings
  2. Select S3 or S3-compatible as the remote type
  3. Enable Path-style URL (important for managed storage)
  4. Fill in the credentials from your Vaulken vault:
    • Endpoint: the S3 endpoint (e.g., s3.fr-par.scw.cloud or your Vaulken proxy URL for managed)
    • Region: the bucket region (e.g., fr-par)
    • Bucket: the bucket name
    • Access Key ID: your access key
    • Secret Access Key: your secret key
  5. Click Check connectivity to verify
  6. Run the initial sync

Your notes are now in S3.

Step 3: Connect your AI tool

Go to your vault's detail page in the Vaulken dashboard. You'll find two MCP URLs:

  • Read-Write: your AI can read, search, and edit your notes
  • Read-Only: your AI can only read and search

Copy the URL you want and add it to your AI tool. The quickest way: open claude.ai, go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration, and paste the URL. Your Obsidian notes are immediately available in your conversations.

For step-by-step setup instructions for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and Cursor, see the Connect Claude to Vaulken guide.

Tip: name your MCP server obsidian-vault or similar so your AI knows which vault to use if you have multiple.

What you can do now

Once connected, your AI assistant can:

  • Search your notes: "Find all my notes about project X"
  • Read specific files: "Read my meeting notes from last week"
  • Cross-reference: "Summarize what I know about topic Y across all my notes"
  • Create new notes: "Write a summary of our conversation and save it to my vault" (read-write only)
  • Semantic search: "Find notes related to this concept" (matches by meaning, not just keywords)
  • Read PDFs: PDFs in your vault are automatically extracted via OCR and made readable

Tips

  • Sync frequency: Remotely Save can sync on startup, on interval, or manually. For near real-time access, set a short interval (5 minutes).
  • Start read-only: Begin with the read-only MCP URL. Switch to read-write once you're comfortable with your AI editing notes.
  • PDF support: PDFs in your vault are automatically OCR-extracted. Your AI reads the text content, not the binary. The first read may take a moment for extraction.
  • Storage limits: The free plan includes 100 MB of managed storage (about 50,000 notes). PDFs count toward this limit. BYOB vaults have no storage limit.

Going further

  • Enable semantic search to let your AI find notes by meaning, not just keywords
  • Use Vaulken's frontmatter tools to manage Obsidian properties (tags, dates, status) programmatically
  • Regenerate credentials from the vault detail page if you need to rotate your S3 keys (managed storage only)