#29

@gsf: you can safely create subfolders in a vault because those subfolders are not vaults.

#30

@Klaas : Thank you, but just to be sure: with no limit, or just one-level ?
(then a vault isnā€™t just "a folder, and any sub-folders within itā€, and has other specificities and characteristics, then, I guess)

#31

@gsf: I donā€™t think there is a limit on levels. I have not tried nested vaults, but I think a vault is a folder with a CSS file in it.

1 Like
#32

ahh yeah no worries @gsf you can have infinite amounts of sub folders inside your vault.

Nested vaults are something different in concept. they just mean that one choses to go to the ā€œchoose a vault menuā€ and choose a sub-folder and treat it as a vault.

that is completly optional and not needed for most users

folders vs vaults are confusing

by default think about everything as a sub-folder in Obsidian, create as many sub-sub-sub folders as you want.

you will know you created a new vault only when you go to the vault menu and deliberatly create a new vault out of a folder in your computer.

Let me know if that helps, and if you have any questions just let me know, happy to help

2 Likes
#34

@gsf: your clicked on the reply button to me, but replied to Santi :wink:

#35

@santi Thank you I think i get the difference now! Ok, but I will try not to have more than three sub-folders levels!
Iā€™ve really immersed myself in using Obsidian because Iā€™ve been wanting to centralize my notes for years, and this is the time (and the tool). I find it so good that I paid to support the development of the application.
Now I need to explore the potential of linked notes.

So Iā€™m taking advantage of your proposal, I have another question thatā€™s still as basic: I created my first vault a little bit quickly as a test, but in the end itā€™s getting more and more structured and Iā€™m really using it, but I chose a name a little bit quickly, can I rename it as simply as you rename a folder in the finder? Thanks in advance.

#36

@Klaas Fixed! :wink:

2 Likes
#37

ahh cool I was just about to show you how, there are no problems renaming vaults, they just have to be selected again from the ā€œvault selectingā€ main menu (for anyone else who might read this)

And yeah I do believe Obsidian is a perfect tool for putting together all notes, the fact that itā€™s markdown plain text files makes a huge difference for future proofing.

1 Like
#38

@santi
About the vaults, I thought of something:
Letā€™s say I have a vault with all my research work.
And inside, a folder with a set of notes that I use most often. So I canā€™t just open in Obsidian this set only (because that would be equivalent to a vault within a vault, I suppose)?
That would have been convenient, so as not to force Obsidian to open the whole (and the heaviness!) of the whole set.

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#39

yeah that would work and itā€™s a good idea of you want to have a small vault to deal with.

However I wouldnā€™t worry about number of notes, if thatā€™s a worry for you I use my vault with over 1000 notes and I have 0 issues with it.

But if you ever feel Obsidian going slow with larger vaults, what you proposed itā€™s a great idea

1 Like
#40

@santi ā€¦but, that would be like making a vault inside a vault, which is not recommended, if I understood correctly?

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#41

itā€™s not recommended mostly for the fact that it might not be compatible in future versions. So far there are no issues (that Iā€™m aware of)

A Vault within a vault is only a way to open a subfolder inside another vault, and open that subfolder as itā€™s own vault (from the opening vaults menu)

I also wrote another post on this if you want to see more disccusion on it.

Nested Vaults (vault within a vault)

I would say, if you donā€™t see an obvious need for using nested vaults in your system, then perhaps you donā€™t need them. itā€™s not a bad idea to avoid them, since we donā€™t know if future version of obsidian will support them

#42

Thank you, yes I will read this because it is interesting for the use of Obsidian.
I have imported a very large number of texts and notes into Obsidian, and for the moment I donā€™t see any slowing down, weā€™ll see as we go along thoughā€¦
So if this continues without slowing down, Iā€™m not going to do nested vault at least for the moment.

1 Like
#43

sounds good, feel free to ask questions if you ever need help with this in the future!
Good luck @gsf

1 Like
#44

I support the continued viability of nested vaults. I am creating online courseware with Obsidian. The student vault has lessons linked to references etc. The parent faculty vault has additional things that I want to prevent students from seeing, such as notes to prof, test questions, and developer notes. 2 sites are published, faculty sees all, students see a cleaned up version. Linking from student site into faculty stuff is prevented. Works just great, would like to keep this functionality.

3 Likes
#45

I just started to create my ā€œsecond brainā€ and wanted made two vaults, one with unedited\sources\origins\notes to store articles and others.
And second vault where I will work with my thoughts and make links to sources.
At first wanted to create two different vaults next to each other, but I found I canā€™t make links to outside vault. So second thought was to create nested vault.

Thanks to all of you for yours replies.

But I was confused by the following situation.
@Daedren

One thing I know: If I have two notes of the same name in the two vaults and the nested vault has a note with a link with that name, inside the nested vault it links to the note of the nested vault while on the main vault the link points to the note of the main vault, not the one originally linked to inside the nested vault, although it can also see it.

So, relative link format will fix this situation, wont it?
I mean, if you have structure like:
MainVault:
ā€“Note1
ā€“Note2
ā€“NestedVault
----NestedNote1
----Note2

And in this case for NestedNote1 relative link to Note2 will be [[Note2]]
For Note1 link to Note2 in MainVault will be [[Note2]] and to NestedVault Note2 will be [[NestedVault/Note2]].

Correct me if I am wrong.

#46

I use nested vaults to represent concentric circles of access control, so far with good success. Eg with the following four nested vaults:

  • notes/ - private home-machine-only content, never synced via cloud, plusā€¦
    • notes/cloud/ - private synced content, synced via encrypted cloud, plusā€¦
      • notes/cloud/public/ - public content, mirrored to website, plus
        • notes/cloud/public/blog/ - published content, announced in rss feed.

and a bit of website scripting: when on your home machine, you can see everything. When on your phone, you see the smaller cloud-synced subset. Anyone with a web browser can see the smaller public subset. Anyone subscribed to your blog feed sees the new content in the smaller blog subset.

#47

Periodically you can review new/edited pages to see if they should be moved to a different (more or less private) vault. In such cases you simply move the file, and your vaults mostly just keep working - a great feature of Obsidian. (Moving a page up to a more secure vault will break links to it in the less secure vault - not a problem. Often splitting the page into two is a good fix.)

#48

Another level suggests itself: notes/cloud/groups in which each of your collaborators has a vault where they only have edit permission, and in which they can read the vaults of others group members and link to their notes. The author or anyone else reading the note can then follow the backlink.

#49

Hi @Ellanxis, I didnā€™t see your post before.

Iā€™ll try to clarify what I meant. It was actually just a heads-up from back when people were extremely vocal about the atomicity of notes and even naming the note as the content of its thought.

So, if youā€™re writing a set of notes in the nested vault and make links and one points to a note named ā€œnameā€, the link will be [[name]], which is also in the nested vault.

But then you open the main vault, which also has another set of notes on its level with a link [[name]]. If you surf your nested vault from the main vault, when you click the link from the nested vault, youā€™ll be directed to the ā€œnameā€ note of the main vault, not the nested one, as it should be.

Note (no pun intended) that the nested vault is never aware of the [[NestedVault/Note2]] relation. The same if you try to link something from the main vault to the nested vault and then try to open it from the nested vault. It tries to create a new note.

This is a very specific problem that is present in very, very few scenarios if any. It is very simple to solve, if you ensure you have unique names for every note across all vaults and between them too.

I hope I was able to clarify it.