Advantages using folders?

I use Obsidian to map information in the organisational and business domains.

I like to create and organise notes by ‘subject type’ - Person, Organisational Unit, Product, Project, Event and so on. I have about 10 of these high-level categories as folders.

Folders for Concept and Zettel capture the less easily-categorised notes.

I also have folders for Journal, Inbox and a couple of others.

Finding this structure is part of the knowledge work for me. I don’t find it awkward or cumbersome to use.

I also have a knowledge map in Roam which is more expansive and free form. That tool doesn’t permit folders, which suits me for the way I use it.

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Folder system has the ability to share spaces among other documents in static site generator like Hugo and wiki system which has CLI like Gitbook. I’m thinking about publisher workflow with Obsidian publish, Hugo, and Zenn. This is the post about that flow on Zenn community, and the post was published from my private repository that was git pushed from Obsidian vault. All of my output contents exist in my vault and everything is densely linked like Evergreen notes. When I have a time, I’m going to write this in English on Forum. (But, Zenn is Japanese brand new publisher service, so it may not help others here)

Besides, I mainly use Folders to control notes’ status. For example, mu main vault has Fleeting, Permanent, Publish folders and Hugo repo and Zenn repo. When I want to turn something into an output content (posts for my personal site or posts for the publisher platform), I just put command “Move file to other Folder”. Then, I get a note to be ready to publish to various internet layers. (thanks to this, I can choose a desired layer to publish among my personal site, Obsidian publish and Zenn community.)

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It’s all about use cases, isn’t it? I always marvel at how humans and animals make things fit in ways that are particular to their own experiences. Thanks for sharing your use case. I’m glad you are in the world.

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I absolutely use folders, and couldn’t function without them. My vaults have 10k-20k files, including a ton of attachment files (images, PDFs, code source files, etc.)

I break down each category into more & more detailed sub-levels. I have basically everything in one Obsidian vault or another, so the ability to quickly locate and use any type of file (in or or out of Obsidian) necessitates the use of folders.

Many files have the same name, but are related to the current location context. Think, for example, of a file called index.md. If it’s in a folder called “Some Story Title” then I can instantly know what I’m indexing (chapters, etc.). If I didn’t have the context, that “index” could be about a book, a list of plants I’m growing, a file full of media to consume, or any number of other things.

Without the structure of folders, I could only have a single file named “Index”, and everything would be a LOT more messy, and more difficult to use.

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I use folders simply because it allows me to reuse some names in different context and the filesystem would disallow that in the same folder. I also tend to group together notes pertaining to the same concept like procedures, technologies, standards, producs, people… but those notes will also get a tag so i can search both by path or tag. Path can also be a shorthand when u want to link as u can use the first letter of a path then slash and it will suggest names from that paths (i wish search could do the same)

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Curious, do you use multiple vaults? How do you delineate new vaults?

One thing I’ve been noticing is that having notes from too many parts of my life in a single vault (I only use one) is leading too costly context switching during work.

I currently have 4.

  1. One for all personal everything.

  2. Essentially an in-universe encyclopedia for everything related to a collection of fantasy series I’m writing.

  3. A job vault. For everything about work (other than people, who live in my personal vault).

  4. An experimental vault that I’m testing out for genealogical tracking, as that seems to be a fairly unrelated data set, and one that’d benefit from a unique set of plugins.

But it’s not as though these are static. Once I get the 4th vault to a nice clean state, I expect I’ll merge it with (and generally hide it in) my main vault.

I use folders.
The main reason is my design of Obsidian vault. I use Obsidian as a collection of multiple databases, supported by Dataview. A database is a set of notes, which have the same yalm front matter structure. The notes for the same database are stored in one folder.

Benefit:
Better navigation while using other text editing tools, e.g. PyCharm or Typora.
PyCharm is perfect for batch processing of the notes.
Typora provides a more fluent experience for writing long text.

The sorting of the notes in the correct folder is done by a small python script. So I don’t care, where the notes are initially stored.

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Elsewhere in a similar discussion I saw someone saying that folders are to organization as plain text is to information.

Linking for PKMs is relatively recent, there is no standard syntax for links, and they may evolve and break in the future. Whereas folders have been around for 40+ years, and we can reasonably rely on them being around for another half century or more.

My usage of obsidian is unusual for the obsidian community. I write about a half dozen short nonfiction articles per month. I have a hierarchical linking system that is very folder like. And I also have a complementary folder system.

I have one folder per project and have an index page in the folder that describes each document in the folder, and links to it. I could do without the folders, but they are a convenient way to keep all the documents for project together, in case I want to move them somewhere at some point.

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Hi Kane, @KaneDodgson
Can I just say I totally admire you for doing what needs to be done, after your injury.

I have a friend and she has brain fog issues, and I offer suggestions how she could make her life easier, but she just seems to prefer to flounder. Her choice of course, but it is wonderfully refreshing to hear your story. (I might even show her this)

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Thank you, sorry for the late reply!

My view is that folders are to organization what plaintext files are to data. Having a folder structure ensures that your notes—in addition to being future-proof and portable individually—will also be future-proof and portable collectively. Just as your notes will be readable with any text editor, they’ll be navigable with any file manager.

In Obsidian, folders don’t prevent you from applying other kinds of organization and linking to them either, regardless of the folders they’re in, so using them in no way binds you to their limitations.

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Hey@Kane, no worries.

So are you saying, you use a TOC (Table of Contents) much like a MOC (Map of Contents), I never understood the difference anyways. In order to make sure you enter these notes onto the TOC, you have a folder, much like an Inbox, where you firstly dump them all. Then when you’re ready, you go through this Inbox and sort all these notes into TOC order? That is a great idea. :disguised_face:

I’ve just started using Obsidian. It’s got a learning curve. I went through all the replies trying to figure out my own starting point. I think for now, given I’m about to create my first real note (having created some test notes) that I’ll just have Inbox and then just start sticking everything into a month-based folder: 2022.09 for my first month of items (being September, 2022, just now).
Then I’ll just tag (is tag the right word?) every item with a bunch of tags.
I know from past attempts at organizing my notes and thoughts that I can quickly box myself in with a structure only to come back later and go what in the world was I thinking?
We’ll see…

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Here’s my two cents (or maybe two dollars :smiley:) regarding folders.

I agree that the ability to easily link, tag, and search documents in modern note taking apps has eliminated the need to create a folder system for the purpose of organizing content. Linking and tagging, like the flow of thoughts in our brains, is organic and therefore unpredictable, and unpredictability is the bane of folder structures. One particular system of organizing with folders may make sense at first, but as content accumulates, the system morphs into a hinderance instead of a help, and it’s tedious and time consuming to change a folder system when large numbers of documents are already filed away. The idea of just being able to toss anything and everything into a big pile with minimal effort, and have it basically organize itself, is thrilling to me.

With all that said, I have found one huge challenge with the “all in one folder” philosophy.

I’ve been obsessing over finding the best note taking app now for the last 10 years, since I first discovered Evernote back in 2011. I’ve bounced between Evernote, ZimWiki, OneNote, Google Keep, Joplin, Diarium and now Obsidian.

I have shuffled literally hundreds of notes between these apps. Most of them have a means of exporting content, but these methods all throw the content into a big pile with no structure whatsoever, because the structure was provided within each application’s proprietary code. That meant that each time I changed apps, I found myself staring at a file pile of over 1000 items, with no tags or links or any way to figure out how to categorize them besides reviewing them all manually.

Now, let me just say I am so far absolutely thrilled with Obsidian. I feel like Obsidian is what I wished ZimWiki (my second favorite) could have been if its developers had chosen Markdown instead of inventing their own wiki markup, and had a mobile app that could sync with the desktop app. I am reasonably confident that Obsidian is going be my note taking bestie from now on. However…given my decade long quest for note taking Nirvana, I still have that lingering fear…what if one day I once again find myself having to organize a single folder stuffed with a mass of thousands of files?

My thinking, at the moment, is to have two separate organizing systems for two completely different purposes. One is the system of folder-independent linking, tagging, formatting, organizing and searching provided within Obsidian, that naturally follows the ebb and flow of my brain and does the organizing of the content for me. The other is a minimal folder system that is general enough to never need to be significantly altered, but specific enough so that if ever have to figure out what’s in it without the benefit of an application other than a file explorer, then I will at least know the general categories of the files. For example, I keep a log of my weight lifting routines. Every note is the same format: date, exercise, muscle group, weight, reps, etc. There is no reason not to put all these in a folder called “Exercise Log”, because that’s the only useful category that applies to exercise log notes. I also have a separate folder I call “Resources”, which contains images, PDFs, and other files that come from outside sources (as opposed to being created by me), and cannot be tagged, contain links or hold frontmatter like Markdown files can.

Thankfully, Obsidian allows these two systems to co-exist and change without interfering with one another.

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I am brand new to Obsidian but hardly new to the requirements of organising electronic documents, since I’ve been using personal computers from the beginning (of PCs that is). Can I first thank everyone for their contributions to this thread? It’s been most enlightening.

It seems that there are two main schools of thought here. The first approach uses folders to delineate different topics, knowing that linking and tagging can break out of this hierarchy as required. The second approach uses folders to indicate workflow, but with most notes (once polished) in one big container. That has never really suited the way I think or work.

My hard drives are a fascinating place. Considering only my project hard drive, where is stored material that I (not someone else) have created, there are 14 top-level folders. Some of these are divided by media (photos, videos, audio, design), some by content (poems, cv, code), some by work (teaching, project, papers), and still others have some sort of meta function (settings). No doubt there’s overlap, since audio and video get used in projects etc. etc. But having some sort of an overall structure helps my brain when I need to decide “where do I put this new thing”? So that’s my first point, based on pragmatism.

Using folders created by my operating systems helps when I need to do operating system type things, like copying to a different computer, backing up, etc. That’s simple utility.

While all that material won’t end up in Obsidian, obviously, a good deal of what is in my documents folder just might. This folder is full of general notes and research, with 16 subfolders. Perhaps that’s too many, so this transduction process (as I like to think of moving information to a new tool) will force me to rethink and reorganise. This doesn’t bother me, since no organisational structure is permanent. For me the tentative nature of a given folder hierarchy is no reason to abandon the idea of folders entirely. That’s my third point.

The way I store information is heavily constrained by the affordances of the OS folder structure. But this will also apply to my Obsidian vault. The tools and user interface Obsidian provides influences (or even dictates) how I will organise information. I am not sure that this point has been emphasised in this thread. Obsidian is not a value-neutral tool that permits all forms of knowledge organisation.

For example, the File Explorer panel can list a finite number of items without scrolling. Naturally this number depends on the size and resolution of your monitor, font size, eyesight, etc. For me it’s about two dozen. That’s a good number, because I cannot scan and comprehend more items than that in one go. So, that’s how many items I want in one folder.

Second example: The tool I’ve been using until now allows favourites to be stored in a two-level hierarchy. You choose the topic and within this you can list favourites in the order you want. The Obsidian star system is a flat hierarchy, though at least reordering is permitted. So that is another constraint on my use.

How I use a tool comes down to how much information I wish to process at a given time. The answer: not much.

If folders didn’t exist, I could create a note as an outline, then use this to re-implement a hierarchy. But this note would require maintenance that very soon would get out of hand.

The main reason I chose Obsidian is that it preserves an OS folder system, rather than putting everything into a database, for example. Not only that, Obsidian exposes this in the interface, so I get the best of both worlds.

I just have one or two requirements to solve and then I can get cracking! In the meantime, shouldn’t this long post be in a vault? :grinning:

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In case this was not mentioned:

You simply need folders when you have need for nodes (= files) with the same name!

For example, if you had a folder with animal names, that would not clash.

But if you want to add “description” and “behavior” for each of them, you need to create very long and individual file names.

If you give every animal it’s own folder, all of them can have the same information blocks as files with the same name.

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please share :slight_smile:

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So in this case “description” and “behavior” would be its own file/note? Why give it an own note and not add it to the animal-note?

And the folder would have the same name as animal-note (like with the folder-note-plugin)?

A thoughtful use of folders can be useful, very useful indeed.
They enable you to separate your global vault space in separate contexts.

For example, I’m working with two distinct companies, I’ve Company A folder and Company B folder. In these folders, each project has a separate folder. It doesn’t make sense mixing A notes with B notes.
In each folder I can have a note with same purpose maintaining the same name (for the example, “00 Home”) without messing their name, like Company A Project X Home.

The problem with folders is their over use, I think. Managing notes in an hundred of folders can be tedious.

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