Dear Obsidian Forum,
Obsidian has become the central piece of my productivity system in just over a year. I strongly believe in the power of having a well-organized information bank as part of your daily life, and Obsidian brilliantly tackles most of the obstacles we face when trying to put this into practice.
One of the few problems I think remains unsolved — and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong — is managing non-Markdown files. Obsidian, in its current state, whether you pay for Sync or not, is a fantastic tool for managing “lightweight content,” which, in my view, includes general text notes with some reasonable exceptions.
That said, I’m sure many of us have come across the problem of integrating what we could call “resources” into the ecosystem. Many artists work with images, of varying resolutions; many researchers have large PDF collections to manage, and the list goes on.
Including such files as part of the vault creates mainly two problems: first, there’s an issue with the system’s execution time. But the main issue, by far, is storage management. Obsidian Sync is clearly limited in that respect, and any third-party external solution is insecure and dependent on those same third parties. That, in my opinion, goes against the very philosophy of Obsidian, which is about giving users the choice to depend or not depend on external services — regardless of any financial aspect.
I understand that, up to now, the ecosystem has been built for note management, so these issues are expected. But I also believe we can’t ignore the fact that when building a flexible personal knowledge manager, resources are essential elements for many people’s routines and workflows, even though they may have a different nature. I firmly believe they should be able to integrate seamlessly. Just the other day, I read a post from @Kepano on LinkedIn asking what features we miss most, and after thinking about it for a few days, I believe this is one of the major gaps that remain to be addressed.
A well-organized cloud is useful, but it feels inorganic. It requires a lot of configuration to integrate properly with the vault, and if, for any reason (financial or otherwise), you want to migrate, you’re left with the hassle of reconfiguring. I see it as a very fundamental piece of the puzzle, but not in the best way.
After some thought, the ideal solution for me would enable two key points: first, indexing large resources (like simple links) within the normal vault elements, and second, providing flexible connection to any external storage source, including local or virtual hard drives. I think the idea proposed in this post is very much in this direction.
At the end of the day, what’s the issue with having a second vault for resources that integrates smoothly? A simple “link” with access to a main root could allow connections to a Drive repository, GitHub, or any cloud provider, just as easily as it would to any local or online source, including a NAS. Migrations would also be easy if the hierarchy is preserved; all it would take is swapping the root link to the new provider or new local location.
Some extra features would definitely be useful, such as enabling or disabling indexing or search in supported file types like PDFs based on certain directory criteria, or having a “ghost file” that holds the hierarchy of indexed resources so that when there’s no connection, you can still see they exist and can be accessed once the connection is restored.
I don’t think this is the case yet, but is there any plugin that allows managing this kind of system with minimal friction? And, most importantly, how do you all handle this issue if you’ve encountered it?
A big shout-out to the whole community — wishing you all a very happy New Year!
Take care,
Jose
