Hi lovely and helpful people.
As ive mentioned im a historian and that’s what my vault is for, my note for a book. I’ve just come across Bases. It looks brilliant, but my vault is already heavily structured around Make.md. Bases look v like make, but I understand they work in different ways.
My vault is pretty big with about 3,500 notes of all kinds.
Should I also use bases as I have a pretty well structured make system
What advantages would bases have as opposed to make
Is there any likely incompatibility if I use both?
Should I bother or stick with the system ive already spent hours developing
If I were starting fresh today, I would keep your note system simple. You wrote that your “already heavily structured around Make.md” vault has 3,500 notes, and Bases does look similar but works from front‑matter fields rather than inline metadata.
Before anything, back up your vault. Then enable the Bases plugin and create one test base for a small slice of your notes (say your book sources). This won’t alter your notes; it only reads front‑matter.
Compare the experiance: Make.md boards are great for pipelines; Bases tables and cards excel at filtering and sorting by fields like status or type. Decide if that view is worth the extra plugin.
You can run both; they don’t conflict, but duplicating metadata (front matter vs inline property:: value) adds overhead. If Make.md already works, you might skip Bases until you hit a use‑case it solves.
Tiny check: create bases-v-make-test.md with a few YAML keys (status: draft, type: article) and load it in a new base and a Make.md board; see which helps you more. Which mobile OS are you on? I’ll check back in 48h.
Lovely advice GraphsGardener. I think after many hours fiddling, I think Ive got a vault I can use via Maje, as I reach the drafting stage of some of my key chapters. The key is easliy accessing the notes I need for a particular subject, e.g.housing and poverty. So, whilst I’ll find any excuse for prevarication. Maybe bases is a bridge too far.