Depending on your OS, you need to find the proper command to symbolically link the topmost folder. You can get ChatGPT to help you with the command.
See in my case:
- 50GB worth of PDFs (mostly PDFs as these files are handled by Zotero).
You can see the folder is just hanging in abeyance there, above the markdown files. It can be anywhere, but I added it to a Zotero folder since these files are needed for the md files below. But the symlinked folder can be anywhere in your vault. Don’t even need to be in the attachment folder, as you can see. The attachment folder is above it, separately in ‘assets’. - If you work with multiple OS’s, you need to symlink on each OS as they are not interchangeable. So you symlink again on Linux, or whatever and place the symlink made on Linux below/next to the Windows symlink.
Once I added a 100+ GB from an external hard drive, with something like 100+k files (I didn’t want this to happen but I didn’t foresee having to remove so many small files, so it just happened). In cases sometimes the folders were 6-7 deep even. No problem.
In Obsidian, you just link the file, without relative or absolute paths:
- You can see the PDF is rendered and no paths are given, only the filename, with embed format.
It goes without saying that if you embed a Word document, Obsidian cannot handle it, but you may try to hunt down a plugin that will display it embedded.
The good thing about symlinks is that I don’t have those PDFs in the vault’s attachment folder or anywhere physically, so they don’t count toward sync or git quota.