Find Orphans
vault_find_orphansFind notes with no incoming links from other notes, excluding specified folders, to surface orphaned notes that need linking into your knowledge graph.
Instructions
Find notes with no incoming links from other notes — orphans are disconnected from the knowledge graph and may be forgotten or need linking. A note that only links to itself still counts as an orphan (self-links are ignored).
Example: vault_find_orphans({ exclude_folders: ["Daily Notes","Templates","About Me"] })
When to use: Vault maintenance — surfacing notes to integrate into the graph. Link an orphan by mentioning it from a relevant note with vault_patch_note. Prefer vault_get_backlinks to check the connectivity of one specific note rather than scanning the whole vault.
Parameters:
exclude_folders replaces the defaults (["Daily Notes","Templates","About Me"]), it does not add to them — include the defaults yourself to keep them. Matched by folder prefix, recursing into subfolders ("Projects" also excludes "Projects/Archive").
limit (default 50) caps results after sorting by most-recently-modified.
Errors:
An empty array means no orphans were found (after exclusions), not an error.
Returns: JSON array of note metadata (path, title, tags, related, folder, type, created, modified, bytes, leading_callout?, additional_properties), sorted by most recently modified. bytes is the on-disk file size.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | Max results (default 50) | |
| exclude_folders | No | Folders to exclude — replaces the defaults (["Daily Notes","Templates","About Me"]), not merged |