Notes that are actually yours.

Notes that are actually yours. Plain files, in storage that is yours alone.

Your vault is a folder of markdown files, kept in cloud storage that 1Presence runs, in a space scoped to your account alone — not a database, and not a folder in your own Drive or Dropbox. That sounds like a small thing. It is not.

Content you can only read through one app is not fully yours — if the company pivots, gets acquired, or goes away, your notes go with it. The vault flips this. Every note is a .md file you could open in Obsidian, VS Code, iA Writer or plain TextEdit. Yours to take anywhere.

And because it is just files, the vault works equally well whether you treat it as a passive output (1Presence writes notes for you), an active workspace (you write notes yourself and let it read them), or both at once.

The vault is not the only place your documents can live. Connect Google Drive and its folders open as pages inside the vault, under a Connected section beside your own — browse them, search inside them, sync a folder in whenever you want a copy. A GitHub repository sits there the same way. The vault is where your agents write by default; they can create a file in Drive when you ask. Some people keep everything in the vault. Some keep the source of truth in Drive and let the vault be where the assistant's own work accumulates. How you split it is yours to decide.

1Presence files things automatically as your work unfolds. The default structure is sensible without being rigid:

You can rearrange any of this. Folder names are not magic. If you want everything in one folder, 1Presence will respect that.

You almost never have to ask 1Presence to write a vault file. It just does it, when something is worth keeping:

• You have a long conversation about a project. It writes up a summary and saves it.
• You mention a new person. It creates a reference file.
• You read a thread. It saves a brief.
• You make a decision out loud. It records what you chose and why.

And you can ask explicitly — "save that as a reference doc" or "start a new project file called Meridian" — at any time.

Not a chat that hands you text to paste. The two of you on the same page.

This is the part that turns out to matter most day to day, and it is the easiest to miss from a description. Open any document in your vault and the conversation comes with it — beside the page on a wide screen, below it on a smaller one, a drawer you pull up on a phone. The document stays in front of you while you talk about it, and it changes as you go.

1Presence knows which file you have open. You never paste it in, never describe it, never say "the document I mentioned earlier" — it is simply there, the way it would be if someone were sitting next to you. Which means you can talk about it the way you would to a person: lose the third clause, this reads like a lawyer wrote it, is that date right?

Select a passage first and it becomes the subject of whatever you say next. That is the small thing that makes the whole exchange feel natural — highlight two sentences, say "tighten this", and there is no ambiguity about what this means. You get to be as vague as you would be out loud.

And it edits the document rather than reading you a revision to copy across. The file changes in place, the version before it is kept, and the next thing you ask reads what is there now. Nothing to paste anywhere.

• Any document, not just writing. A lease you want explained clause by clause, marketing copy you are cutting to half the length, a builder’s quote you are comparing against another, the running note on what has been done to the boiler. If it is a document, this works on it.
• Whichever agent suits the job. Switch the one answering from the panel itself — the editor for the copy, the researcher for the contract — without leaving the page. More on agents.
• Documents shared with you, too. Open one someone has sent you and work on it the same way, within the access they gave you — reading it together if that is all you have, editing it if they allowed that. More on sharing.
• Versioned either way. When 1Presence makes a change you asked for, it writes it to the file there and then, keeping the version before it. When you edit by hand, you save when you are ready — and if you get called away mid-edit, the unfinished changes are waiting when you come back.
• Or bring a whole folder to the chat. Drag a folder in, or attach one, and it lands in the vault with its structure intact — one line in the conversation saying where it went and how many files.

Editing happens here, beside the conversation, with the version before every change kept and nothing to paste anywhere. But the files underneath are ordinary markdown, and that is the guarantee: download a document as Markdown, PDF or Word, any folder as a zip — the root folder is the whole vault — and open it in Obsidian, VS Code, iA Writer or plain TextEdit. Ask for a copy in the chat and a Download button appears right there. The files are the files.

And if you keep a folder of notes on your own machine, connect it and press Sync whenever you want the vault to catch up. It runs one direction, up, only when you ask, and your local files are only ever read.

Every folder is open to every agent unless you say otherwise. Keep a folder to one agent and it wears a padlock and that agent's mark; only that agent can walk in, and every path an agent takes into the vault honours it. In a team workspace the same idea runs along people: a folder can belong to a team, and every member has a space of their own that not even an admin can open. And an agent you have kept private can take past conversations, files and memories into its care — you tick what it should hold, from its Access tab, and your other agents stop seeing them.

The vault is not just storage — it is built to be lived in:

• Search two ways. The explorer's box matches words — find any note by what is inside it, not just its title. Ask 1Presence, and it searches by meaning: the right note comes back even when you filed it under another phrase.
• Version history. Every edit — yours or 1Presence's — is kept, and each version says how it arrived: synced from a folder, edited here, written by your agent, restored from history. Look back and restore an earlier version in a tap.
• Rich previews. Open a PDF, a spreadsheet, a Word doc or an image right in the app, alongside your markdown notes — no download needed. A scanned PDF is read page by page, as pictures, so a photographed letter is as readable to 1Presence as a typed one.
• Images inline. Drop a screenshot into a note and it embeds; saved attachments keep their original file, made searchable too.

• Browse the entire vault inside the app — the folder tree on one side, the document on the other, and the conversation about it alongside.
• Edit any file inline and save when you are ready — the next conversation reads the updated version. Called away mid-edit? Your unfinished changes are waiting when you come back.
• Share any document — a one-tap public link with a typeset reader view and social preview, or a private share with named people who can read, comment, or edit alongside you.
• Export everything — the root folder downloads as one zip of markdown files, any time, and the export still works after you cancel.