Organizing Items with Folders and Tags

As a vault grows past a handful of items, structure matters. StretchVault gives you two complementary tools for organization: folders, which create a hierarchy within a vault, and tags, which cut across items regardless of where they sit.

Folders vs. tags

• Folders are hierarchical, like a filing cabinet. An item lives in one folder path within its vault — for example Clients/Acme or Infrastructure/Databases. Use folders to group items by team, client, project, or system.
• Tags are flat labels you can attach to many items. An item can have several tags. Use tags for cross-cutting attributes like production, billing, retire-soon, or a client name.

A good rule of thumb: use folders for the primary way you browse (usually by client or system) and tags for the secondary ways you filter (by environment, sensitivity, or status).

Creating and using folders

1. Open the Folders tab for a vault.
2. Choose New folder and enter a path — for example Clients/Acme. Nested paths use a slash to separate levels.
3. Save. The folder is now available when you create or edit items.
4. When adding or editing an item, set its folder to place it inside that path.

Folder paths can be up to 180 characters, and leading or trailing slashes are trimmed automatically, so /Clients/Acme/ and Clients/Acme are treated the same.

Using tags

Tags are set on the item itself:

1. Open or create an item.
2. In the tags field, add one or more labels.
3. Save. You can then filter the Items list by tag to pull together everything that shares a label, wherever it lives.

A realistic example

Meridian Studio's Client Credentials vault holds items for a dozen clients. They create a folder per client — Clients/Acme, Clients/Riverside, Clients/Northwind — so browsing by client is one click. Then they tag items across all clients: everything that authenticates a live payment integration gets a billing tag, and anything scheduled to be handed back gets a retire-soon tag. When a client offboards, the account manager filters the Items list by the retire-soon tag to find every credential to rotate or delete, regardless of which client folder it's in.

Designing a structure that scales

• Keep folder depth shallow — two levels (like Category/Name) is usually enough. Deep nesting is harder to navigate than a good tag.
• Pick a consistent naming convention and stick to it: Clients/<Name>, Infrastructure/<System>, SaaS/<Tool>.
• Reserve tags for status and attributes that change (retire-soon, needs-2fa) or that span folders (a client name, an environment).
• Revisit structure when a vault crosses ~50 items; that's usually when ad-hoc naming starts to hurt.

Tips

• Combine folders and tags: browse to a client folder, then filter by the billing tag to zero in fast.
• Use a retire-soon tag as a lightweight rotation queue that pairs naturally with the rotation plan.
• Because folder paths are plain text, you can rename a scheme gradually by editing item folder values — but choose your convention early to avoid rework.

Troubleshooting

"A folder name or path is required." The folder path was empty. Enter a path such as Clients/Acme and save.

My folder isn't showing items. Confirm the items' folder field exactly matches the folder path (case and separators matter). Edit any misfiled item and set the correct folder.

A path looks different from what I typed. Leading/trailing slashes are stripped and very long paths are trimmed to 180 characters. Keep paths concise.

FAQ

Can an item be in two folders? No — an item has one folder path. Use tags for the cross-cutting groupings.

Do folders affect who can see an item? No. Folders and tags are for organization only; access is controlled by vault administration and per-item grants, not by folder.