Dividing my big vault into smaller ones made it better

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Edit: It’s IMPRESSIVE that this thread has gotten 400 views! Thanks to everyone who has viewed it. But shouldn’t 400 views result in more interaction? Please remember that if you liked my posts, you can thank me by giving them a like, and you can contribute to every Obsidian user by sharing your experiences in the thread! Thank you!

I’ve been an active Obsidian user for nearly a year now, and I believe it stands head and shoulders above other note-taking apps. For that, we owe a big thanks to both Obsidian and its open-source plugin developers.

There was just one major downside to Obsidian for me, and that was the indexing issues with large vaults. This problem was especially noticeable on relatively older Android devices, to the point where I even considered getting a new phone. But then, I came up with a new approach, which worked wonderfully. While I usually start threads to discuss issues, I’m creating this one to share and contribute my new solution.

According to Syncthing, I have around 23,693 notes in Obsidian. I was also using about 64 plugins. Naturally, managing such a large vault had become nearly impossible. So, I divided my vault into four separate vaults and customized the plugins for each one. As a result, I significantly reduced both the number of notes and plugins in each vault. In a way, I followed the “divide and conquer” tactic. :slight_smile:

Looking back, I wish I’d implemented this tactic much earlier, even from the start. It would have saved me from prolonged indexing sessions, a sluggish Obsidian interface, and the hassle of dealing with these issues. But as a Turkish saying goes, “It’s a profit to turn back from any point of loss.” And here we are. I hope this topic will be helpful to everyone, especially to those who, like me, are struggling with large vaults. Thank you to everyone who has read this far.

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Hey Paladin, divide and conquer is powerful, but it comes with the challenge of adequately dividing your note base into suitable standalone modules. Since nested vaults are discouraged, each of your new vaults cannot link to any of the notes in the other vaults any more. So, if you are willing to share, I’m interested in how you decided to split your vault.

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Hello,

You’re highlighting an important point. Initially, this was also a critical issue for me, but after reconsidering, I decided it wasn’t as significant.

My note system is divided into four main sections: the first section is personal notes about myself, the second is archives from YouTube, news sites, and forums, the third is academic notes and thoughts, and the fourth is notes captured via a web clipper that I plan to distribute to other vaults later on.

This is where I have to emphasize Obsidian’s essential feature. In Obsidian, you can access all your notes and folders independently from the computer’s directory. Therefore, transferring notes from one vault to another is already easy. But in my previous app, like Joplin, notes and directories were embedded within SQL (if I remember correctly), which made this impossible. Because moving notes between vaults is so effortless in Obsidian, the issue you mentioned becomes irrelevant. It’s a huge step forward not to suffer from unnecessary notes all piled in a single vault, as I did in the past.

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I did the opposite, because I don’t relish keeping 4-5 Github repos for different vaults, even down to having to switch username and git credentials in GitHub Desktop when I need to sync my local changes with the remote.

So my vault is bulky (but less than 15k notes) but I needed to weed out plugins that made my vault sluggish.

  • I made allusions to those (types of) plugins in this thread.

In time, I may remove some “modules” of all-in-one plugin. I actually I removed one where the md files were quite big with large tables (Obsidian doesn’t particularly likes those) and I relate to those files with Obsidian URI links.

As for Nested Vaults, those would only make sense for me with symbolic links, but I haven’t bothered with employing that method…yet.

An important thing I missed in the linked thread, though:

Obsidian core Graph plugin.
People complained about lags with it being enabled, even when no graph was active in any panes or tabs.

Try disabling it and see the difference.

But then again, it works flawlessly without any lags other times. So one needs to fiddle with it.

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Thank you for sharing your experiences. Honestly, even though I use many plugins, I haven’t encountered a specific issue with GitHub. Therefore, since this GitHub experience seems unique to you, I can’t really comment on it.

Believe me, I used to think like you. However, after dividing my notes across different vaults, I can’t even describe the sense of relief I felt. This same motivation led me to open this topic. My suggestion is not to approach anything with a fixed prejudice. You can try it out for a few days and give the idea a chance. If you’re still not satisfied, then sharing your experiences might be even more productive.

Thank you very much for your suggestion regarding the core graph plugin. Yes, for large vaults, the Graph feature is unfortunately not very functional. I have it open on mine because I like the local graph feature. But let this be a warning for other users.

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GitHub I use for sync (git); GitHub Desktop is a GUI for git (I use it mainly for diffing changes and easy rollbacks of changes) and has some limitations.

Separate vaults also mean opening all vaults at the same time: more Obsidian instances and processes, while on mobile you cannot even have more than one instance of Obsidian running… I think it was the mobile issue that made me merge all my vaults…?

On PC you would have the same hotkeys and automations (otherwise you could get confused), and this would mean that when you come up with good new workflows (plugin data changes, etc.), you’d need to copy or automate copying these to the other vaults as well. So there’s a lot of overhead with this kind of cutting up a bigger vault into chunks.

There’s also one hidden “benefit”: when the vault starts getting sluggish, you investigate and remove the bulky, ill-fitting CSS or plugins that are not maintained.

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No, that’s not the case. Since I don’t know your vault, I’ll speak based on my own. I split my vault of approximately 25k notes into four separate vaults. Since I also copied the plugins and CSS snippets, there was no need to reinstall them.

As a result, when I want to switch from Vault A to Vault B, both vaults don’t have to stay open at the same time! I can close Vault A and work in Vault B. The only difference is that on PC, I can keep both Vault A and Vault B open simultaneously, while on mobile, I can only have one vault open at a time. But this doesn’t matter at all, as I naturally focus on a single vault at a time anyway.

Additionally, I should mention that I set a different theme for each vault. This has had a positive effect visually.

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I don’t want to deter you from applying whatever logic fits best and I don’t want to take over this thread.
Just sharing my experience.

8k, 15k, 25k notes – doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is what you have onboard, CSS, plugins, etc.
For example, I have fresh experience of merging my vault onto this newly advertised demo vault and while I kept trimming the original functionality – plugins used, exchanging some bulky CSS snippets with my own but keeping some of those I had no replacements for – I never got close to what I had before in terms of snappiness so in the end I just took some of the goodies I found in that vault and incorporated them in my original vault.

So ultimately, large vaults are not a problem, what matters is how your device can handle hoarding ill-fitting pieces (which will not cause real problems until you have large quantities of files and links: a large metadatacache).

And again, let me stress here this is not a one-on-one conversation here. Everywhere on Reddit or on this forum people will maintain Obsidian can handle large vaults. The problem is themes and CSS.

You have a problem if:

  • tab opening and closing are slow
  • scrolling in larger documents breaks up (not smooth)
  • Backlinks and Search Modal results are slow coming in with progress bar not flowing naturally
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First, you shared incorrect information about using multiple vaults. Then, when I corrected that mistake, you suddenly switched to another topic.

Yes, if you use minimal plugins or CSS snippets, you might be able to use a large vault with fewer issues. However, even in this case, there is no guarantee that issues like the graph problem mentioned by you won’t occur.

I argue that splitting a large vault into smaller vaults will significantly improve user experience compared to using a single large vault. I base this claim on my own concrete experience. You, on the other hand, are trying to refute my argument with hypothetical assumptions without even trying my method. This doesn’t seem like a constructive approach to me. Therefore, unless there’s a change in your approach, I don’t see the benefit of prolonging this discussion.

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I’m not here to prolong anything. This is a free forum.

My information was about it being safe keeping large vaults, but:

  • large files with large table data I did decide to keep in a separate vault
  • Graph core plugin even without active Global or Local usage, just its being in ON position can hinder performance, but other times no problem at all…

These are again, known things, not my own experience.
I’m sorry if sharing these thoughts caused any inconvenience.

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There’s absolutely no problem with you sharing your thoughts. In fact, thank you very much for that. The issue is approaching an argument without having tested it. But since you’ve also decided to try using multiple vaults, you can share your experiences in detail in the future. This will also help other users in making their decisions. Congratz and good luck with this!

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I’m glad I found this topic, as A new user I have started to quickly in Obsidian.
For now my main vault is photography, there I store everything related to this subject.
But slowly other ideas/stuff are coming to save in Obsidian, as a Mac user I have chosen for saving the vaults in iCloud. And opening the photo vault on my phone can take a while, due to the indexing.
Now rest the question how many vaults are manageable?
Comic/book/cd/records one vault
Some IT stuff in another

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It’s pleasing that it is useful. Instead of keeping the archives in iCloud, you might also consider using Möbius Pro.

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I’m not quite seeing how this solves the issue. everytime you want to reference a note that is in another vault you have to manually copy it over? and if you do, now its not in the other vault so links there break. And if you have 2 copies, then you update one the other becomes outdated.

How exactly does this solve the issue?

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Hello. I think you might not have fully understood my suggestion about using multiple vaults. After creating different vaults and distributing your notes among them, you won’t need to transfer those notes again. You’ll simply organize your notes under different vaults based on their purpose. This offers a constructive solution to indexing issues as well as problems caused by excessive plugin usage and having too many notes.

But if, for some reason, you want to transfer your notes, you can easily do this with a simple cut-and-paste since you can access your notes directly from the files section. Afterward, you may need to manually relink or retag the notes. However, plugins might make this process easier for you.

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By the way, it’s IMPRESSIVE that this thread has gotten 400 views! Thanks to everyone who has viewed it. But shouldn’t 400 views result in more interaction? Please remember that if you liked my posts, you can thank me by giving them a like, and you can contribute to every Obsidian user by sharing your experiences in the thread! Thank you!

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What if you need to link notes together that come from different vaults? You can’t search for a single doc across all vaults simultaniously right?

Unless I’ve further misunderstood, doesn’t this entirely rest on the assumption that you can divide your notes into “boxes” that never have connections?

I don’t want to be rude, and I’m glad it works for you, but this is less of a “new approach to the large vault issue” and more just “a description of the obvious thing many people with large vaults try before discovering inherent flaws in”

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The lots of views is because you gave your post an ambitious title, which draws people in

the lack of engagement, likes and people commenting “great idea” is maybe an indication that your solution doesn’t work for most people or is one they’ve heard before.

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It’s necessary to be concerned about linking notes from different vaults. Over time, we separate vaults precisely in line with the “divide and conquer” strategy. Therefore, there’s no disadvantage to organizing different groups of notes under independent vaults. So, your example with “boxes” is valid.

While I respect your criticism, I disagree with it. For one, there’s no data suggesting that every large vault user has tried this. Many people may not even consider using multiple vaults, or they might avoid this practice due to misinformation. If you read the previous posts, you’ll see that they actually serve as an example of this.

I choose the title of a thread based on its content. This title reflects a new and practical approach. More importantly, it may be the most concrete and constructive contribution yet to addressing Obsidian’s chronic issue—the “indexing” problem on Android, which remains unresolved or reoccurs for some reason even when thought to be fixed. Of course, if you don’t have a large vault, you wouldn’t experience these effects. Therefore, this topic is directed at those using large vaults.

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I tried to use separate vaults. If I needed to link notes between different vaults, I used URI. It had its disadvantages (for example, no backlinks), but mostly worked.
The one real weak poin for me turned out to be mobile. If you could open several separate vaults on mobile at the same time, it would be perfect. But right now switching between vaults on mobile is super slow and uncomfortable, so I decided it doesn’t worth it. So now I only use two vaults: one for my main notes and another one for archived notes, and I hardly ever open the second one.