VaultBook by the Numbers: Usage Patterns from Our (Anonymous) Community Survey
There is a specific kind of usefulness that aggregate data provides that individual stories cannot. A migration story tells you what one person found when they moved to VaultBook. A feature deep-dive tells you how a specific capability works. But neither tells you whether the person you are reading about is typical, whether the workflow they describe reflects what most users actually do, or whether the features they rely on are the same features that matter most to the broader community.
This article is an attempt to answer those questions. Between March and May 2026, we conducted an anonymous voluntary survey of VaultBook users. Eight hundred and forty-seven people completed it. The survey asked about vault size, organizational structure, encryption habits, search and retrieval patterns, tool usage, how long people have been using VaultBook, and what they were using before they arrived.
The methodology is worth stating plainly before the findings: the survey was voluntary and self-selected, which means the respondents are not a random sample of VaultBook’s user base. People who choose to participate in a product survey are disproportionately engaged users with strong opinions about the product. The numbers here reflect the practices of engaged VaultBook users, which is the population most useful to understand for the purpose of this article - but they should not be read as representative of every person who has ever opened VaultBook.html.
With that caveat noted: here is what 847 engaged VaultBook users told us about how they actually use the product.
Who Responded: The Professional Breakdown
Survey respondents were asked to identify their primary professional context, choosing from a list of categories with an open-text option. The distribution was more varied than we expected, and reveals something interesting about who VaultBook has found its way to.
The largest single group was legal and compliance professionals at 19.3% of respondents - attorneys, compliance officers, paralegals, and in-house counsel. The second largest was researchers and academics at 17.8% - graduate students, faculty, independent researchers, and research staff. Healthcare and clinical professionals came third at 14.2%, a group that includes therapists, physicians, clinical social workers, and allied health practitioners. Technology professionals (engineers, product managers, security researchers, and data professionals) accounted for 13.7%. Journalists and media professionals made up 9.4%. The remaining 25.6% spread across creative professionals, educators, consultants, financial advisors, and an open-text “other” category.
What this distribution suggests is that VaultBook has attracted, disproportionately, professionals in fields where the sensitivity of notes is a first-order concern rather than an afterthought. Legal work, clinical practice, investigative journalism, and security research all share a common property: the notes generated in the course of the work are not merely personal information but professionally sensitive material with confidentiality obligations attached. These are not people who became interested in privacy after reading a news article. They are people whose professional training includes confidentiality as a core obligation, and who approached their note-taking tool selection with that obligation in mind.
The technology professional segment warrants a specific note. Within that category, the most common open-text responses identified people working in security research, privacy engineering, and compliance roles rather than general software development. VaultBook appears to have found significant traction in the part of the technology industry that thinks about data handling for a living.
Geographic distribution: 58.2% of respondents were located in the United States, 17.4% in Europe (with the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands most represented), 11.3% in Canada and Australia, 8.8% in other English-speaking regions, and 4.3% from other countries. The European concentration likely reflects the higher ambient awareness of data rights among users who have grown up with GDPR as a policy framework.
How Long They Have Been Using VaultBook
Respondents were asked how long they had been using VaultBook as their primary note-taking tool. The median tenure was 26 months - just over two years. Fourteen percent of respondents had been using VaultBook for more than four years. Twenty-two percent had started within the last six months.
The tenure distribution matters for interpreting the rest of the data. A user who has been in VaultBook for four years has had time to develop a sophisticated organizational structure, accumulate a large body of notes, discover which features they rely on most, and iterate through several versions of their vault workflow. A user who started six months ago is likely still discovering capabilities and refining their approach. Both groups are represented in the survey, which means some of the “what features do you use” data reflects both mature, settled workflows and newer ones still finding their shape.
The retention signal in this distribution is worth noting separately: of respondents who reported starting VaultBook more than a year ago, 91% described it as their primary note-taking tool today. In a category where the conventional wisdom is that users try multiple tools and maintain parallel workflows, that retention rate reflects something about the commitment that comes with a genuinely offline, local-first system. When your notes are a folder on your device rather than a cloud account, leaving is a deliberate act of migration rather than a gradual drift.
The Vault Size Question: Entries, Pages, and Labels
We asked three questions about vault size: how many entries the vault contains, how many top-level pages are in use, and how many distinct labels are in use. The answers show a wide range with a recognizable central tendency.
Entry counts: The median vault contains 312 entries. The mean is substantially higher at 847 entries, indicating a long right tail of power users with very large vaults. The 25th percentile was 94 entries and the 75th percentile was 641 entries. Eleven percent of respondents reported vaults with more than 2,000 entries, and 3.1% reported more than 5,000 entries - the multi-decade accumulations of people who have migrated from previous tools and whose vault is effectively a career-length personal knowledge base.
The highest reported vault size was 14,200 entries, belonging to a respondent who identified as an attorney and described spending “about eight months migrating notes from four different applications, some going back to 2009.” This is not the vault of a hobbyist trying out a new tool. It is a professional knowledge library built over fifteen years of practice.
Page structure: The median number of top-level pages was 11. Most respondents had developed a page hierarchy that reflected their primary professional and personal domains rather than attempting to model every category of note with a dedicated page. The most common organizational pattern, described in open-text responses, was 4 to 6 professional domain pages, 2 to 3 personal pages (home, finances, health or similar), and 1 to 2 operational pages (active projects, reference, or an inbox equivalent). VaultBook’s nested page hierarchy supports infinite depth, and 67% of respondents reported using at least two levels of nesting (parent pages with child sub-pages). The median nesting depth was 2.3 levels.
Labels in use: The median respondent used 9 distinct labels. The minimum was 1 (a small group of respondents who described using a single status label as the only classification beyond page placement) and the maximum reported was 47. The most commonly mentioned label names in open-text responses were: reference, active, important, to-review, draft, done, encrypted (as a visual flag independent of the technical encryption status), personal, and work. Labels used for professional classification - practice area labels for attorneys, clinical category labels for healthcare workers, subject area labels for researchers - appeared consistently across the relevant professional groups.
Eighty-one percent of respondents reported using at least one label as a workflow state marker - a label whose value represents where an entry is in a process rather than what it is about topically. This pattern reflects a workflow maturity that uses labels not just for retrieval but for status tracking, functionally complementing the Kanban Board’s visual representation of the same states.
What They Were Using Before
The migration question - “what was your primary note-taking tool before VaultBook?” - produced findings that map well to the broader market but with some surprises in the distribution.
Evernote was the previous tool for 31.4% of respondents, making it by far the most common origin. This is consistent with Evernote’s historical dominance of the professional note-taking market and with the timing of significant user departures from the platform following its ownership change and service reliability issues. Among the Evernote migrants, the median tenure at Evernote before switching to VaultBook was 7.2 years - these were not casual or recent Evernote users but long-committed ones.
Notion was the previous tool for 22.1% of respondents. Notion’s prevalence as an origin platform reflects its broad adoption among knowledge workers over the last several years, as well as the growing concern among professional users about Notion’s AI product terms and their implications for sensitive content stored in the workspace.
Microsoft OneNote accounted for 17.6% of previous tools, with the largest concentration among enterprise technology professionals and journalists, both groups with historically high rates of Microsoft Office ecosystem usage.
Apple Notes / Bear (grouped together as local-sync Apple ecosystem apps) accounted for 10.8%. This group had the shortest median Evernote-equivalent tenure at their previous tool - 3.4 years - suggesting a more recent cohort of privacy-conscious note-takers who had already moved away from cloud-first tools once before.
Google Keep / Google Docs (used in combination as a de facto note-taking system) accounted for 8.3% of previous tools, with the highest concentration among academic researchers. The remaining 9.8% reported a range of previous tools including Obsidian (already local-first users who wanted a browser-based alternative), Standard Notes, Roam Research, Logseq, and plain text files.
Migration time: Respondents were asked how long the initial migration from their previous tool took. The median reported migration time was 4 days, with 43% completing migration in a single day. The longest reported migrations - spanning weeks - were almost exclusively from Evernote, reflecting the combination of large vault sizes (many Evernote migrants had 3,000 to 8,000 notes), format conversion requirements, and the desire to reorganize the structure rather than simply porting it as-is. Among the respondents who used VaultBook’s Import from Obsidian tool to process Markdown exports, 78% reported completing the content import phase in under two hours, with the remaining time spent on organizational restructuring.
Security and Encryption: How It Is Actually Used
The encryption question produced the single most striking finding in the survey. We asked: “Do you use per-entry encryption for any entries in your vault?” The response was 78.3% yes.
That is not 78% of healthcare workers or 78% of journalists. It is 78% of all survey respondents across every professional category. In a note-taking tool that offers per-entry AES-256-GCM encryption as an optional feature rather than a mandatory one, nearly four in five engaged users have chosen to encrypt at least some entries.
The follow-up question - “what percentage of your vault entries are encrypted?” - revealed a bimodal distribution. The largest group (39% of the yes respondents) encrypted fewer than 10% of their entries - using encryption selectively for the most sensitive material while leaving the majority of the vault in plaintext. The second largest group (28% of yes respondents) encrypted 50% or more of their entries, treating encryption as the default state for any work-related content. A smaller group (11%) reported encrypting virtually everything, using per-entry passwords as a baseline protection regardless of content sensitivity.
The professional breakdown showed predictable variation: healthcare professionals encrypted the highest proportion of their vault on average (62% of entries), followed by journalists (54%), legal professionals (51%), and security researchers (48%). Technology professionals outside the security domain encrypted the lowest proportion on average (19%), consistent with a lower baseline of professionally sensitive material.
When asked what drove their use of encryption, the most common themes in open-text responses were:
“Client and patient confidentiality” - mentioned by 94% of healthcare respondents and 87% of legal respondents, framing encryption not as a personal preference but as a professional obligation.
“Source protection” - mentioned by 89% of journalist respondents, often accompanied by language about the inadequacy of policy-based protection and the necessity of technical barriers.
“Peace of mind about device access” - mentioned across all professional groups at 61%, reflecting concern about scenarios involving device theft, shared computers, or other people accessing the device.
“The password caching makes it practical” - mentioned by 47% of encryption users as a specific feature that made the workflow sustainable. Per-entry encryption that requires re-entry of a password every time an entry is opened would be unusable for entries accessed multiple times per session. The session caching - which stores passwords in memory for the duration of the browser session - was cited as the feature that made encryption a daily workflow rather than a friction-heavy exceptional step.
Forty-four percent of encryption users also mentioned using the lock screen feature - the full-page blur overlay - as a complement to per-entry encryption, activated whenever they step away from the desk mid-session.
Search and Retrieval: The Core Daily Workflow
Search is the feature that VaultBook users interact with most frequently, and the survey confirmed that both the main search and the Q&A panel are deeply integrated into daily workflows.
Main search: 91% of respondents reported using the main search bar daily or near-daily. This is the expected finding for any note-taking tool that is being used as a primary knowledge store - retrieval is the point of storing notes in the first place. More interesting is the reported satisfaction with search relevance: 84% of respondents rated VaultBook’s search as “meeting or exceeding expectations” for finding what they were looking for, with 31% choosing the response “consistently finds what I need on the first search.” The weighted relevance scoring - which puts title matches at 8 points and label matches at 4 before descending through body text, OCR, and attachment content - appears to produce results that feel correct to the people relying on them.
The typeahead dropdown, which begins surfacing results as the first characters are typed, was described as a primary retrieval mechanism rather than a secondary one by 58% of respondents. “I often find the note I want before I finish typing the query” was a common phrasing in open-text responses, reflecting the value of the real-time suggestion behavior for notes whose title is known or approximately known.
Q&A panel: 71% of respondents reported using the Q&A natural-language search at least weekly. Among researchers and legal professionals, that number rose to 89%. The use case described most frequently in open-text responses was retrieval of information whose exact location in the vault is not known - asking a question to find which entry or entries contain the answer, rather than searching for a note by a remembered title fragment. “I use QA when I know what I’m looking for but not where it is,” was a formulation that appeared in dozens of open-text responses across professional groups.
The vote-based reranking in the Q&A panel - upvoting results that are correct and downvoting ones that consistently appear but are never the right answer - was used by 56% of Q&A users. Among those who used it, 73% reported noticing improvement in result quality over time, and the median reported time before they noticed that improvement was approximately six weeks of regular use.
Search history and query suggestions: The search history feature, which retains up to 200 past queries and surfaces them as suggestions using fuzzy matching, was rated as “frequently useful” by 62% of respondents. The pattern described most often was the emergence of a personal search vocabulary - a set of query strings developed over time to reliably surface specific categories of notes - that becomes faster to execute with history-based suggestions than to reconstruct from memory each time.
Attachment Indexing and OCR: The Invisible Workhorse
We asked how many file types respondents regularly attach to vault entries, and what types they were. The median respondent worked with 3.7 distinct file types on a regular basis. PDF was the most prevalent at 79% of respondents, followed by images (67%), DOCX (41%), XLSX (28%), and PPTX (19%). MSG files were attached by 12% of respondents, concentrated among legal and enterprise technology professionals who work extensively with Outlook email archives.
The percentage of respondents who reported having images embedded inline in their notes - screenshots pasted directly into entries rather than attached as separate files - was 82%. Among those with inline images, 94% reported that the OCR-based search of those images had returned useful results at least once. “I searched for text that was only in a screenshot and found it” was one of the clearest proxy indicators of OCR value, and 71% of respondents with inline images reported this experience.
When asked how they learned that VaultBook’s OCR had indexed text from an image, the most common answer was discovery - they ran a search for a term and were surprised to find it surfaced from an entry where they did not remember typing that term, then realized it existed only in an inline screenshot or attached image. Serendipitous discovery of a capability by its results, rather than by reading documentation, was the dominant pattern.
The Re-index button, which triggers a full rebuild of the attachment index, was used by 67% of respondents at least occasionally - most commonly after adding a batch of new documents to the vault or after migrating from a previous tool.
Deep attachment indexing (PDF full-text extraction, DOCX text layer plus embedded image OCR, XLSX cell values, PPTX slide text, ZIP contents, MSG recursive extraction) was rated as “essential to my workflow” by 58% of respondents who were Pro users. The most frequently cited use case was the ability to search across a library of attached PDFs without opening each one - effectively turning the vault’s attachment collection into a full-text searchable document archive.
Tools: Which Ones People Actually Use
The Pro Tools panel contains fourteen built-in tools, and the survey produced a clear ranking of which see the most regular use.
File Explorer ranked first, used regularly by 68% of Pro respondents. The ability to browse all vault attachments organized by file type, by entry, or by page addresses a practical need that grows with vault size: navigating an attachment collection that has grown to hundreds or thousands of files across years of use. “I use it to find files when I remember the file type but not which entry it’s attached to” was the dominant use case description.
Kanban Board ranked second at 61% of Pro respondents using it regularly. The Kanban Board reads from entry labels and inline hashtags to organize vault entries as cards in configurable columns, and its native integration with the main vault means the board stays current as labels are updated on entries throughout the vault. The most common reported column structure was a simple workflow pipeline: To Do, In Progress, Review, Done, with the board providing a cross-domain project view that the page hierarchy does not naturally offer.
Save URL to Entry ranked third at 52% of Pro respondents. The tool fetches the readable text from a web page URL and creates a vault entry from it, integrating web research directly into the note-taking workflow rather than maintaining a parallel system of browser bookmarks. Journalists and researchers showed the highest usage rate for this tool at 78% and 74% respectively.
Threads ranked fourth at 44% of Pro respondents. The chat-style overlay for rapid capture during calls, meetings, and conversations resonated most strongly with professionals in client-facing roles - legal professionals (61% usage), healthcare workers (57%), and consultants. The framing in open-text responses was consistent: Threads is where you type when something is being said and you need to capture it without navigating the main interface.
PDF tools (Merge, Split, Compress) ranked fifth collectively, with 41% of respondents using at least one of the three PDF tools regularly. Legal professionals showed by far the highest usage rate here at 76%, consistent with a practice environment that involves heavy PDF document handling.
Import from Obsidian was used as a one-time migration tool by 64% of respondents and reported as occasionally useful for ongoing import of Markdown-format content by 23% of those who had used it. Its single most important characteristic, according to open-text responses, was that it processed standard Markdown files regardless of their origin - making it the gateway for migrations from Evernote (via format conversion), Bear, Standard Notes, Notion, and any other tool that exports to Markdown.
Reader (RSS and Atom feed reader) was used regularly by 29% of Pro respondents, with a higher concentration among journalists (61%) and researchers (44%). The combination of a feed reader integrated directly into the vault - allowing articles to be saved as vault entries from within the Reader - created a research intake workflow that several respondents described as replacing a separate dedicated feed reader application.
Password Generator, Folder Analyzer, MP3 Cutter and Joiner, Photo and Video Explorer, and File Analyzer each showed usage rates between 18% and 35%, reflecting tools that serve specific use cases rather than broad general ones. The Password Generator’s usage was highest among technology professionals and security researchers (67%), who generate credentials frequently as part of their work.
AI Suggestions and Smart Features
The AI Suggestions carousel - the sparkle-icon panel with four pages covering upcoming entries, recently read notes, recent files, and recently used tools - was checked at least daily by 76% of respondents. Among respondents who had been using VaultBook for more than a year, that number was 84%.
The page that respondents reported as most frequently useful was Page 1 - the Suggestions page showing upcoming due-dated entries and the weekday reading pattern. The weekday pattern component, which identifies the entries most frequently read on each day of the week over the last four weeks and surfaces them as likely-relevant on the matching day, was described by 69% of respondents as “often accurate” or “consistently accurate.” The most common description of its value was not that it surfaced things they would not have thought of, but that it surfaced things they had meant to look at and had forgotten - a gentle ambient reminder built from observed behavior rather than explicit configuration.
Page 2 - Recently Read (up to 100 entries, deduplicated and timestamped) - was described as a “return to active work” interface by the majority of respondents who relied on it. “I use it to pick up where I left off without having to remember where I was” was a formulation that appeared repeatedly. For users who open VaultBook across multiple sessions on the same day - a morning research session, a midday documentation pass, an evening review - the Recently Read list provides an instant reorientation to the day’s active material.
Related Entries (the contextual similarity panel that surfaces notes most similar to the one currently open) was used regularly by 63% of Pro respondents. The reported primary value was discovery of connections across the vault that were not apparent at note-creation time - two entries written months or years apart that turn out to be about related topics, surfaced by the relevance scoring that considers title, body, OCR text, labels, and attachment content simultaneously. Among respondents who had been using the Related Entries panel for more than six months, 71% reported it had surfaced at least one “significant connection” between notes that they would not have made without the panel.
The vote-based learning system across both Q&A and Related Entries - where upvoting and downvoting results trains the relevance scoring over time - was used by 54% of respondents overall and 71% of respondents with more than 18 months of VaultBook tenure. The pattern of adoption over time is consistent with what the feature design intends: the value of vote-based training becomes apparent after enough sessions of use that the cumulative effect of votes is visible in result quality. Users who have only recently started using VaultBook have not yet accumulated enough votes for the effect to be salient. Users who have been using it for a year or more are likely to have trained the search in ways that reflect their specific professional vocabulary and knowledge structure.
Smart Label Suggestions - the feature that analyzes entry content and suggests labels based on what similar content in the vault has been labeled - was rated as “useful” or “very useful” by 72% of respondents. The practical benefit was described most often as consistency maintenance: in a vault that has accumulated hundreds or thousands of entries over years, ensuring that similar content carries similar labels is difficult to maintain manually. The suggestion chips that appear during editing surface the labels that the vault’s existing organization would apply, reducing label drift and keeping the filtered views coherent.
Version History: The Quiet Safety Net
Version history - per-entry snapshots stored in the vault’s versions/ directory with a 60-day retention window - was accessed by 62% of respondents at least once. Among that group, the reported reasons for accessing it were:
Recovering content edited away: 51% had used version history to retrieve text they had deleted or overwritten during editing. The most common scenario was editing an entry significantly, realizing that an earlier version contained something that should have been preserved, and using the history to retrieve it.
Reviewing the development of an analysis or document: 31% had used version history to trace how a piece of analytical writing or documentation had evolved over time - not to recover deleted content but to understand how the thinking had developed. This use case was particularly prevalent among researchers and legal professionals.
Documenting the timeline of note-taking: 18% had accessed version history specifically to document that a note had been created or modified at a particular time - to establish that an observation or analysis was recorded before a specific event, for purposes that ranged from personal clarity to professional documentation.
The 60-day TTL was considered appropriate by 74% of respondents, with 19% expressing a wish for longer retention. The storage implication of unlimited version retention - in a large vault with frequently edited entries - was mentioned by several technically informed respondents as an appropriate design trade-off.
How People Work: Session Patterns and Cadence
We asked how often respondents open VaultBook on a typical week and roughly how long a typical session lasts. The results describe a population of daily or near-daily users with sessions ranging from quick captures to extended working blocks.
Session frequency: 64% of respondents reported opening VaultBook every day or almost every day. Twenty-three percent reported opening it three to four times per week. The remaining 13% described a less frequent pattern of weekly or intermittent use, concentrated among respondents who described VaultBook as a reference archive they consult regularly but do not actively write into daily.
Session length: The median reported session length was 34 minutes. The distribution was bimodal, with a cluster around 5 to 15 minutes (quick capture and retrieval sessions - opening VaultBook to add a note, find something, or check the Suggestions panel) and a second cluster around 45 to 90 minutes (extended working sessions involving note creation, editing, research, and attachment management). The two clusters correspond to the two primary ways respondents described their relationship with the vault: as an ambient daily companion checked briefly and often, and as a focused work environment entered for longer blocks of deep knowledge work.
The Timetable feature, available to Pro users, was used regularly by 38% of Pro respondents and described primarily as an integration layer between the vault and time-based commitments. Entries with due dates appear on the Timetable automatically, and the sidebar ticker keeps upcoming items visible without opening the full calendar modal. Among respondents with clinical or legal practices - where appointments, deadlines, and court dates are structural realities of the work - Timetable adoption was 61%.
The Random Note Spotlight, a Pro sidebar widget that surfaces a random entry from the vault and refreshes hourly, was used deliberately by 29% of respondents as a spaced-repetition tool - a way to resurface older entries that have not been recently read. The use case described most often was the rediscovery of notes written in earlier phases of a project or research area, which could then be linked to current work. Among respondents with vaults containing more than 500 entries, the usage rate rose to 44%, consistent with the intuition that the feature becomes more valuable as the vault grows large enough that unread material accumulates faster than it can be reviewed.
Mobile and multi-device use: Sixty-seven percent of respondents reported using VaultBook primarily on a single device, consistent with the architecture of a local folder vault that lives on one machine. Twenty-six percent reported accessing their vault from multiple devices by keeping the vault folder synchronized through a local network share, an external drive, or a file synchronization utility they manage themselves. The remaining 7% kept separate vaults on separate devices with periodic manual consolidation. The multi-device patterns represent users who have made intentional choices about how to maintain a local-first system across devices, rather than delegating that responsibility to a cloud vendor.
What Users Wish They Had Known Sooner
One of the open-text questions asked: “Is there a VaultBook feature or workflow practice you wish you had discovered earlier?” The responses - which were among the richest qualitative data in the survey - cluster into a handful of recurring themes that function as community-sourced onboarding advice.
“The Import from Obsidian tool works for any Markdown file.” This was the most common response from users who had migrated from another platform. Many respondents had delayed migrating their existing notes because they assumed the Import tool only worked for Obsidian vaults specifically, not realizing that any application that can export Markdown can feed into it. The discovery that the import pipeline is format-agnostic for standard Markdown files unlocked migrations that respondents had been postponing.
“Per-section attachments change how you structure entries.” Respondents who had initially attached all files to the main entry level reported a significant workflow improvement after discovering that attachments can be associated with specific sections within an entry. A DOCX attached to the section that analyzes it, rather than to the entry generically, makes the relationship between document and analysis explicit and keeps the File Explorer’s by-entry view organized at a meaningful level of granularity.
“The Q&A panel and the main search are doing different things.” A common early confusion was treating the Q&A panel as a more powerful version of the main search bar, expecting it to replace the bar rather than complement it. The respondents who described this as a turning-point insight had come to understand the main search as the tool for finding known entries (searching by remembered title fragment, keyword, or label) and the Q&A panel as the tool for finding unknown answers (asking questions when you know what you are looking for but not where it lives in the vault).
“Vote a few search results and the search gets noticeably better.” Respondents who had been using VaultBook for less than three months were the most likely to describe the vote-based reranking as a discovery rather than a known feature. The mechanism - upvote or downvote a result, and the score for that entry on that query shifts by a million points - produces visible results quickly when the same queries are run repeatedly, but the effect is invisible until a few votes have been cast and the results visibly change order.
“Labels plus the Kanban Board are better together than either one alone.” The Kanban Board that reads from entry labels is valuable on its own as a project-tracking view, but respondents who described the most mature project management workflows used the combination: labels applied thoughtfully during entry creation and editing (with Smart Label Suggestions helping maintain consistency), and the Kanban Board as the visualization layer that makes the label states visible across all active work simultaneously. The two features were designed to work together, but that relationship is not immediately obvious on first encounter with either one individually.
“The version history is a safety net you only appreciate after you need it.” This response, in various forms, appeared dozens of times. The pattern was: a user edits an entry significantly and later wishes they had kept something from the earlier version. They open the version history for the first time in the process of trying to recover it. They find what they were looking for. After that experience, they keep version history in mind as a standing feature rather than discovering it only in moments of distress.
The Portability Dividend
We asked a question that had no pre-defined response options: “Has there been a moment when the fact that your vault is a local folder mattered to you?” Seventy-three percent of respondents answered yes, and the themes in their open-text responses clustered into three categories.
The most common theme was continuity confidence - the reassurance that the vault would still exist and be accessible regardless of what VaultBook as a company chose to do with its product, its terms of service, or its business model. This response was particularly concentrated among long-tenure users who had experienced the anxiety of a previous note-taking application changing its terms, raising prices abruptly, or being acquired. “I know that even if VaultBook stopped existing tomorrow, my notes would still be there, in plain files, readable with a text editor” was the distilled version of this response, appearing in dozens of variations.
The second theme was device-transition ease: respondents who had moved to a new computer described the migration of their VaultBook vault as copying a folder - a few minutes of file transfer - versus the account-based migration processes required by cloud applications, which often involve waiting for re-sync, resolving conflicts, or managing subscription status across device transitions.
The third theme was confidence in sensitive sessions: respondents who work with confidential material described the comfort of knowing that note-taking during a sensitive conversation leaves no digital trace on any server. The local folder is under their physical control. There is no background sync running, no server receiving partial saves, no cloud account that could be subpoenaed without their knowledge.
What the Numbers Reveal
Taken together, the 847 responses trace the outline of a user community that arrived with strong professional privacy needs, stayed because the tool performs the core note-taking function better than what they left, and built vaults that have become genuinely irreplaceable to their professional practice.
The high encryption adoption rate - 78% using per-entry encryption - is not the behavior of users who treat encryption as an edge case. It is the behavior of professionals who understand that the sensitivity of their notes requires technical protection, not merely policy commitments from a cloud vendor. The feature exists, it is accessible, the session caching makes it practical, and the people who need it use it at a rate that reflects genuine professional need.
The search satisfaction numbers - 84% rating search as meeting or exceeding expectations, 91% using it daily - are the core data point about whether the product earns its position as a primary knowledge store. A note-taking tool that people cannot retrieve from is an archive, not a knowledge base. The retrieval experience in VaultBook, built across main search with relevance scoring, Q&A with natural-language scoring and vote-based training, Related Entries with contextual similarity, and AI Suggestions with behavioral pattern recognition, appears to be earning its position for the majority of users who depend on it.
The tool adoption pattern - with File Explorer and Kanban Board leading, followed by Save URL to Entry and Threads - reflects a user base that has integrated VaultBook into professional workflows that extend beyond note-taking into project management, research intake, and rapid capture during live conversations. The tools are not novelties. They are workflow infrastructure.
The vault size distribution - median 312 entries, with a significant tail of power users well above 2,000 - indicates a product being used at the scale of serious professional knowledge management. A vault with 312 entries is not a collection of passing thoughts. It is a working knowledge base built up over months of deliberate use.
And the tenure retention number - 91% of users who started more than a year ago still describing VaultBook as their primary note-taking tool - is the number that says the most about what happens when someone decides to trust their notes to a vault that belongs to them. They tend to stay.
VaultBook - your personal digital vault. Private, searchable, and entirely under your control.