1 Vault or 2 Vault?

sadik · February 4, 2026, 12:03pm

What I’m trying to do

i just created account to ask this Question. i am a student as well as a graphic designer and at free time i write novels, and i have been using two vault for now. one for novel another for all the other stuffs.
now that i have been starting to take graphic design notes, i feel like it will go up to 200 files along hundreds of images. so,

one vault for Novel
one vault for other staff.
and now i have been thinking of dividing 2nd vault into one for solely graphic design. and another one for personal and study materials. should i process with it or not.

Craig · February 4, 2026, 2:58pm

His @sadik , welcome to the Obsidian community!

Many people (including myself) prefer to use separate vaults for separate concerns, and it’s not always easy to figure out where the line should be. I have three primary vaults for my work, reference, and personal life, as well as individual vaults for creative endeavors.

Other people prefer to keep everything in one vault for easy reference and linking. I think both are valid approaches, so you may have to experiment to find out what works best for you.

There was a good discussion on this topic a few years ago you might find helpful:

There was also another discussion, a bit more about “what are vaults for”, that you might find interesting:

If you have more specific questions please ask; most folks are usually happy to talk about their approaches. Good luck!

Craig

sadik · February 4, 2026, 4:39pm

thanks for replying such a useful comment. yeah, having one vault is fine or more meaningful if you think obsidian as a second brain, it’s like your one brain holding everything in one place but in a structured way. But when i think of Tags, Property data appearing when i am taking personal notes, that’s when it feel annoying. I am not installing even theme just so it look as it is, and even using only css snippet to clean options like property panel from top of note. There is also search features where Graphic material to appearing when searching personal staff. So, all in one, i just don’t want to feel annoyed, that’s why i am thinking of separating, but having two means working double. and forgetting about one when working on another😀

So, i know the advantages and disadvantages, but still stuck in between. can you give me your reason for using two vault (for my case it will be three, as i already have two vault).

Craig · February 4, 2026, 4:58pm

Sure! I keep separate vaults for a couple of reasons:

First, I need to keep my work and personal data separate.

I work in software development, so I manage projects that have information private to my employer that I don’t want on my personal computer. Likewise, I have personal notes that I don’t want on my work computer. So I keep a work vault on my work computer, and a personal vault synced to my home computer, phone, etc.

I also keep a third vault, called “Reference” that contain technical notes that are useful both at work and at home, but don’t contain any info private to either. I keep a copy of that vault on both my home and work machines via Obsidian Sync (my employer permits this).

An advantage of this approach is that I can use separate accent colors for each vault, so I always visually “feel” where I am and am less likely to accidently put the wrong info in the wrong vault.

Second, I like to reduce distraction by keeping focused vaults.

Outside of work, I like to develop stories and tabletop role-playing games, and I have to maintain a lot of notes in order to keep all the people, places, and plots straight. I keep a separate vault for each game, so that when I’m thinking creatively about one world I’m not distracted or confused by notes about a different world. I’m pretty distractable, so this is very valuable for me.

Keeping separate vaults is especially helpful when different characters or places happen to have the same name; there’s no chance of overlap. It also allows me to keep separate schemas for each vault; in one world I might need to track, say, languages carefully; in others I might not care about that at all, but need a very detailed timeline across different ages.

There is a cost to all these separate vaults, of course; if I have references or tables or languages that are common to more than one story, I have to keep those in my personal vault or else keep multiple copies. But this doesn’t happen too often, and the value of focusing my attention and separating concerns far outweighs the cost of occasionally managing multiple resources.

Well, that’s probably enough rambling for now. Hope this helps.

sadik · February 4, 2026, 5:52pm

i just little push to decide. your comment helped me. keeping data separate is what i have always done. then there is distraction you mentioned. i feel it too. just earlier, when reading your comment, i saw my profile is missing and went to make one by Gemini. you can see it. at that time, i was suppos to work on my design project, but my Quick note had a checkbox of deciding one or two vault and my focus shifted here, leaving my work.
but the only reason why i am afraid to make many vault is that i forget easily, so so easily that sometime i forget what to do next time. even my one to-to list become few more, even adding version like number i can’t control.

so, i fear of forgetting about other vaults., though it won’t forget as they will appear at the start point. so you can see this is the biggest problem i am facing when i am deciding.

sadik · February 6, 2026, 8:56am

hi, there. i have decided to start over from the very beginning, and i found the method in Obsidian (written by CEO himself) and decided to follow it.
i just wanted ask you, Could you please suggest some basic property option that i would need in obsidian and absolutely need them, like date created, aliases, tag, Description.
i just want to have some property that i will get used to by using.

Craig · February 9, 2026, 3:54pm

Hi again!

Which basic properties do I think every note in your vault needs to have? I’m afraid I have bad news. My advice is: don’t start with any universal properties at all. This is because you don’t yet know which properties (if any) will be helpful to you.

Every property you add to your notes, especially a property you expect to be on every note, is adding friction to your vault. Every new note will require a little extra work to add the required properties before you can use it. If you decide you want a new property, you have to go back and update every note to add it in. The more friction in your vault, the less you will want to use it. And having to update properties that you aren’t even sure you need is extra tedious. Creating new notes should be as effortless as possible.

Instead, I suggest you use no properties at all at first. Or, at least, only the properties that you need, right now, to get the task in front of you done. Unnecessary organization is often a distraction from real work, and can smother your creative spark.

Eventually, after making many notes, and learning when you need them again, you will discover what properties you really need, and on which notes. And because you will then know the value the properties bring, it will feel uplifting to maintain them instead of frustrating. You will gain confidence in your vault, and your notes will help you do your work instead of distracting you from it.

I hope this helps. I’m not trying to be a downer, just sharing my own observations from making this mistake over and over again.

Best of luck,

Craig

sadik · February 11, 2026, 6:45pm

thanks a bunch for explaining so nicely. i did find my self troubled by this. Thus i am just using a few even though i have 14+ property names. i just keep them in case they come to me, asking to be joined. . i just use created, category ( since i am leaving the folder structure, category is a must have and i know which one to add) and aliases (because i often create same note, with similar names) that’ are the property i use for now.