How would you migrate years' worth of notes to Obsidian?

[Fortyone]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using a few apps to store my thoughts over the years. I started in Notion, then a few years ago moved to Craft Docs, which I’ve been using daily for personal notes and to manage various client and internal projects.

At the same time, I built a “second brain” with a few hundred book notes, as well as notes on related courses, long form videos or podcasts.

So far I’ve kept these separate, but lately I’ve found myself less drawn to Craft - the main reason I was using it in the first place was the ability to quickly share notes as well designed pages, which I think Obsidian has now caught up with.

I’m now exploring moving everything to Obsidian, I believe with Claude I can make this work faster than the months’ worth of work manually moving and formatting notes used to take. But I’m unsure whether to:

1. Add everything in one huge vault. I worry this might slow down the app with the addition of thousands of notes and files.

2. Keep the “second brain” and add a “work/personal” vault for day to day notes. This might work, but it might also become a landfill of archived 'stuff".

3. Keep the second brain, add an “archive” vault and start a third fresh vault moving forward.

I’m curious if anyone has made this move recently and what approach you favored.

[Jopp]

In my opinion you should not keep data in one place only: to prevent data loss. Of course you can make backups but if you’ve notes on paper, then keep them on paper.
Just process what’s really important: less waste of time and worries. Sometimes we don’t know if stuff becomes important, so in doubt, file these in some specific place like “incubator”.

Export your notes as text if possible, you can rename their name extension afterwards with “md” for markdown.
Export your images and optimize them on the same go, so you don’t fill your new vault with hd images that would slow down Obsidian.
Otherwise, if you wanna keep the specific layout of your original notes, with images, text formatting, etc export your originals as PDF.

Markdown isn’t as flexible as rich text format because markdown is basically plain text, there isn’t any formatting.

Of course, you can apply formatting through markdown like bold/italic but for specific formatting like sub and sup you’ll need styling tools like css snippets. You can find styling snippets here in this forum, just put the right keywords in the search form to find relevant threads/posts.
And if you need some specific styling you can ask in Custom CSS & Theme Design

Also, I would suggest you to create at least two vaults instead of one, eg work/private. Less mess, more focus for areas which don’t belong together.

To create a useful vault, have a look around this forum for ‘starter kits’ and of “Tiago forte” to create an actionable vault. Important to familiarize with personal knowledge management to use fully Obsidian’s potential. There are lots of books about pkm. Example

[pdworkman]

When I migrated thousands of notes to Obsidian, then I created a new vault for each notebook in my previous app, believing I would want to keep them separate. But eventually, I merged most of my vaults together, and only keep separate vaults for my book series worlds now.

Generally speaking, thousands of md notes will not slow an Obsidian vault down. Plugins are usually the culprit in slowing things down.

My series vaults also contain a lot of image and video files for marketing, and this does not slow them down either.

[juhis]

Back in the day when I migrated from Notion to Obsidian, I copied some of the most important notes at the beginning and then over time when I noticed I needed something, I brought it over until there was nothing interesting left.

I have a couple of vaults but they are for very separate use cases. My main vault is a one big vault with “everything in it” but I do have a separate work vault for stuff that I delete when I leave a job and a vault for my published notes. In the work vault I only keep work-related, specific stuff that is covered by NDAs so it’s easy and safe for me to delete when I format my work computer and return it.

My main vault has my daily/weekly/monthly journaling notes, all my personal project notes, my movie and game reviews and all the knowledge stuff (second brain, PKM, whatever you call it). I have found that it works really well for me because I tend to cross-reference stuff from my daily notes and journals to stuff I’ve learned and written about.

@Jopp

In my opinion you should not keep data in one place only: to prevent data loss.

From backup perspective, true. Personally I like to keep mostly everything in one app/solution/place so that it’s easy to find (using one search compared to having to potentially search in all different vaults) and easier to reference other notes in the system.

But yes, please have a good backup system for your notes or you will eventually lose stuff. A 3-2-1 backup strategy is a good one: 3 copies of data on 2 different media and 1 of them off-site (ie. not your home).

@Fortyone

Add everything in one huge vault. I worry this might slow down the app with the addition of thousands of notes and files.

I don’t know how many thousands you have but I have around 4k notes and ~600 images and I haven’t seen any slowdown yet. Generally working with text files is quite fast on computers.

@Jopp

To create a useful vault, have a look around this forum for ‘starter kits’ and of “Tiago forte” to create an actionable vault. Important to familiarize with personal knowledge management to use fully Obsidian’s potential.

I would like to offer a different opinion on this:

I’ve seen so many times people (including myself) dive deep into making complex vaults and adopt systems by other people and either 1) spend too much time looking into that and plugins and organisation and less on thinking and writing and 2) start to feel Obsidian is too complicated or “heavy” app to use.

I believe that starting from an empty vault with zero plugins or starter kits is better. Start by writing a note. Then write another one. As you write notes, you’ll learn what works for you. And you’ll start to notice things that your system needs and then you can look into plugins and organisation to see if there’s something that solves the problem.

Keep your notes system as lean as possible and only introduce complexity when a real need arises.

[Jopp]

Hey @juhis,
Nice to read your post, I agree with most of your points!

@juhis

I’ve seen so many times people (including myself) dive deep into making complex vaults and adopt systems by other people and either 1) spend too much time looking into that and plugins and organisation and less on thinking and writing and 2) start to feel Obsidian is too complicated or “heavy” app to use.

I agree on this too, other people’s vaults / mindset isn’t ours, basically it’s like forcing ourself to do things we don’t own (yet) and maybe we won’t own ever.

But here’s the thing: to find out what we need, I preferred to explore different pathways to build an easy to use, yet organized personal vault.

When I started, my intention was to begin a learning process, not to build a final, functional vault. To open my mindset to Knowledge management and therefore, getting to know possible tools to find out my temporary setting. Temporary setting, because over time pkm teaches us how to synthesize our fragmented world view and to use tools in refined or new workflows.

Therefore, my view on this is, to experiment with dummy vaults to get a broader perspective in function of personal knowledge management, rather than forking/following blindly extraneous systems.