How best to reorganize an existing vault

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1

Now that I know a little more about Obsidian, what is the best way to reorganize the 250 notes I already have into my new construct? I want to eliminate all of the old tags, topics, links, etc. and start fresh. What should I do?

What I’m trying to do

a vault containing 250 notes reorganized.

Things I have tried

watched videos.

1 Like
2

I’d personally recommend that you do not do that. From my personal experience I’ve dealt with wanting to restructure everything into some perfect construct. There is no perfect construct. Your effort would be better spent on building good connectiong through your notes as you return to them naturally.

Many people here and elsewhere that use obsidian like to show off their specially crafted note taking environments but the key thing left out is how much time they spent building the environment instead of just taking notes naturally.

My personal recommendation would be to leave it as is but, using either your graph view or a base with filters, find the orphans you have or notes tagged with tags you don’t like. Having a way to collect what you don’t like in one place will help you passively restructure things. Don’t go head first into some big refactor because you’ll likely want to restructure things again in a few months.

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I appreciate your advice, and you may be right. But I’ve made a mess of the organization trying this and that, initially. Nothing is consistent. I think I can live with the new structure I have in mind. It shouldn’t be hard at this early stage to reorganize. Is it possible to remove all structures, putting me back to just unorganized notes, and then add new folders, tags, etc? If so, how?

4

Thank you. I am looking into Bases, and it looks like I can fix it there. I appreciate your suggestion.

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Friendly reminder about step one in reorganizing:

Make sure you’ve solidly backed up your vault.

Not sync, not a single copy on the same drive, but a real back-up system.

Then you can run wild changing anything or everything, worry-free. Because you’ll be able to restore the old mess anytime you need to. No changer’s remorse.

Also, good luck!

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You could start a new vault, and copy info into it from the old one as you need it.

If you want to modify your existing vault (after backing it up):

  • To remove all links you could use a plugin or app that does search-replace across files and replace [[ and ]] with nothing.
  • If your tags are all in properties, you could use an app that does search-replace with regular expressions across files (or a plugin if one exists now) and replace something like ^tags?:.+$ with nothing. If not, you could do something similar to remove hashtags, but that will be a little trickier. As preparation you might use the Tag Wrangler plugin to merge them all into a single tag to simplify removal. Or Tag Wrangler (or another plugin) might be able to transfer hashtags to properties.
  • I’m not sure what you mean by replacing topics, which aren’t an Obsidian structure. If you mean how your info is divided across files, you could merge bunches of files together (or in the extreme, all into 1), then reorganize and (perhaps) redivide.

Or you could change each note in your existing vault when you use it, for a more gradual approach.

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