Clean Obsidian directory or existing directory with files/folders?

Basement
1

Hi there, first - loving it :-).

Do you recommend a clean directory just for Obsidian notes or is it OK to use an existing directory which already has existing files?

I have multiple vaults that each live in disparate places, so before Obsidian I already have:

\Work\Project1
\Work\Project2
\Personal\Learning\Finance
\Personal\Learning\Kids

and I might want one vault for Work and one for Personal so I could either have the Obsidian vault live in \Work\Notes or simply \Work. If I did \Work then I would hope all the folders etc. appear in the Obsidian file explorer and any existing markdown files appear etc.

Is this correct or does Obsidian assume it has sole ownership over its vault directories?

Thanks!

2

Hi! I started from pre-existing, different vaults for different activities but in the end, I converged to one vault for everything.

You could define vault as you want, recursively every folder in the root of the vault and will appear in the vault, for example, I have a structure like that

image
image474×736 36.9 KB

So you could nest as much as you want, but think which way it will be the most convenient for you!

Obsidian will see all markdown files, after creating the vault you could still access the files as before, Obsidian will only create its own config files (hidden) in the root of the vault

If you also use other markdown editors to edit the files the only thing you need to think about is that some of them [editors] don’t follow [[ ]] links if linked file will be in another folder (for example 1Writer on iOS)

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