- Use one external hard drive or you can have 2 with the same structure, one for backup.
- Symlinks: You don’t need to symlink multiple items, only the top folder. So whatever you do beneath the top level doesn’t matter. You can move things around, if you want subfolders to add, whatever.
- I’m not sure what Obsidian does when you do this frequently, though. It’s possible that it will have to reindex something and there will be some freezes on start-up. Otherwise, no issues.
- Multiple OS’s: You add one symlink of the top-level folder on all OS’s. Done. I do it for Windows and Linux. On iPad I have limited space, so only sync one third of my stuff, which would still last me a few lifetimes, at the rate I’m going…
I don’t keep everything in Zotero. I upload vids to YouTube, it automatically transcribes it, then I keep the full transcription and the AI made summary.
What you do inside the vault doesn’t matter. As long as the symlinked items are there, you can hide those folders with File Explorer++, doesn’t matter. You’ll link to the content anyway. It’s like they are inside the vault but they are not.
I don’t use for syncing anything else but git at the moment. Symlinked items are not uploaded to the remote. I’m not sure how any cloud sync providers fare. I’d re-think syncing options then.
You have a Python script written that generates and updates md files for your attachments, along with thumbnails and metadata. They you can query. Every day or week you re-run the script to update stuff.
And mostly, take this advice: you’d want to set something up, you need to let some things go. You only will pick up ideas to improve your setup along the way.