Multiple Vaults Issue

Help
1

First, search the help docs and this forum. Maybe your question has been answered! The debugging steps can help, too. Still stuck? Delete this line and proceed.

What I’m trying to do

Resolve a second 'Vault' under Obsidian Vault

Things I have tried

  1. Vault 1 (Obsidian) is on my desktop xxx/Desktop/Obsidian,
  2. Vault 2 is located ‘somehow’ in xxx/Desktop/Obsidian/Vault 2.
  3. When I open Vault 1 - Obsidian, Vault 2 is a folder under Obsidian.
  4. When I Open Vault 2 using file/open vault, I can view both Vaults and select only Vailut 2

Q1: if I want to keep them separate do I just follow the guide to move the Vault?
Q2: even though I created Vault 2 as a new Vault - why does it show as a folder?

Opinion please: Vault 2 is a unique project (a map of our assets and financial info for benefactors upon death) is it best to maintain it as a folder under Obsidian as is?

Thank you

2

This is a nested vault set up rather than a separate vault set up. Search for nested vaults to access all the discussion around their use.
When Vault 1 is open , Vault 2 will be a folder and you can access all files in it.
When Vault 2 is open, you cannot access files in Vault 1 that are outside its folder.
To have separate vaults they should be xxx/Desktop/Obsidian and xxx/Desktop/Vault2

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3

I’ve read the pro & con arguments about having more than one Obsidian Vault, and I’m surprised to see very little appropriate opinion for either way. Personally, I have three vaults that I use constantly. Here’s why!

I got interested in Obsidian way back in November 2023, not knowing exactly what it entailed. The advertisement said that it was a ‘Note taking/making app’. Why did I need that kind of app? Well, I just went ahead and downloaded the app, and gave it a couple of months of evaluation. Wow! There was more to this product than advertised. For what it was capable of doing, it was ‘better than sliced bread!’

I had a career within the IBM technical environment, and at some point, I could have really used Obsidian. In any event, once I started using the app, I began to have questions, about more than just creating notes. I started asking myself; why doesn’t it do this, or why can’t I to that, or make these icons a color? You know what I’m talking about. I would suspect that ANY user of the product, that has the ‘hacker syndrome’ would be frustrated, not being able to do something for themselves, to make Obsidian ‘jump up and say howdy’!

So, after looking at the app with a ‘techie gaze’ I saw where I could create additional vaults. In fact, I found the tutorials showing me how to begin coding my own plugin, and then a theme for that plugin. Of course, there were several other things one needed, in order to begin the technical journey into Obsidian deep water: an editor, suggested by the developers, VS Code. All answers to my urges to get into the product, and find out how it worked. So, my second vault was born, which I named, myDevlVault (my development vault). I had already created my first vault, named, myCommonplaceBook.

myDevlVault relieved me of screwing around with my [[commonplace book]] vault, which is something that one REALLY doesn’t want to do. Naw! Build yourself a sandbox where you can play around, and possibly screw something up, not with your production data. But then, you can have multiple vaults waiting in the ‘side stages’, for focusing of other things. Hey, it’s your vault(s), protect it however seems most profitable; PC memory is relatively cheap!

All this to say, I’ve got a third vault, myObsidipediaVault, which is, as it sounds, a Wikipedia look-a-like, where I compile, and use, it the same way we all use Wikipedia: to find out stuff, and where to go from there. Any digging into Obsidian that I do, for whatever reason, when I find some deep, dark, secret about how to do this or that in the app, I record in in [[ObsidipediaVault]] for the next time I have questions about something technical about obsidian.

Pat Hatchel

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