Thanks for giving it a name that I can search for. 
So how does this work with plugins and hotkeys configuration which is individual to each vault? I tried opening the parent vault. But it seems I have to populate it with the plugins that I use at the child vault level, no? In your opinion, is there an easier way to work this out?
Nested vaults give a range of advantages and disadvantages. I doubt they would be an ideal solution purely for hiding multiple folders - there are other ways and feature requests for related things that you might prefer to support.
Yes.
The ability to have different plugins, hotkeys etc for different vaults can be seen as an advantage (it is to me), though obviously it isn’t if you want everything the same way.
My suggestion for for easily managing the setups would be to directly copy/edit/paste the relevant files in the original .obsidian into the same folder in the new vaults. Ideally you would have a working knowledge of how and where Obsidian keeps its settings before mucking about too much - but it’s pretty simple really.
Hi @Dor , thank you for clarification!
I tried doing that but some of the plugins don’t show up in the app even though they show up in the plugins folder. What I did was copied the plugins folder from the .obsidian folder of the source vault into the plugins folder of the .obsidian folder of the destination vault. I could see the plugins of the source vault now in the destination vault’s folder. But when I launched Obsidian and went to “community plugins” section, I didn’t see those new plugins.
I am obviously doing something wrong. I saw that there was also a community-plugins.json. Maybe I should have copied that over too? I didn’t copy over the entire .obsidian folder because I was afraid of some conflicts in the destination vault. Is that what I should be doing?
You’d definitely need the .json.
You wouldn’t want to copy the whole .obsidian to every vault - for instance cache would be inappropriate. Have a look at the content of each file in the folder and decide whether you think it would be reasonable to copy it in or not. I’d suggest testing everything out with two dummy vaults, one nested in the other. This is the type of approach where you’d need to know how to do your own troubleshooting. Obsidian could change its approach to storing settings at any time, so be warned.
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I like using one vault for the convenience of searching and opening notes without knowing where they are, creating links between all notes, as well as the ability to move notes between folders (I don’t see a way to move notes between vaults).
Using one vault also works well when using git repositories for different folders. I’ll document my set up here in case it’s helpful to others:
I use git because I like how it handles syncing, I need to collaborate with others, and I’d like to use some services that use git to publish. I have a few groups of notes, in different folders, which are sourced from different git repositories:
- A git repo of my main set of notes for PKM.
- A git repo of my company’s internal wiki/operations manual, which several people collaborate on. This git repo must be separate because it shared with others.
- A git repo of public notes that are published to my website. This git repo must be separate because its contents are made public.
I’ve combined my git repos into subfolders, like this:
-
/main-vault/ ← The one vault, contains the
.gitfolder for my PKM notes and a.gitignorefile that excludescompany-wikiandpublic-notesfrom this repo. - /main-vault/company-wiki/ ← A second git repo shared with colleagues.
- /main-vault/public-notes/ ← A third git repo pushed to netlify to generate a public website.
Obsidian on macOS considers all these one vault and manages the notes together, which is convenient. In Obsidian on iOS, it works similarly by using Working Copy’s “Setup Folder Sync” function.
To keep the notes in sync on macOS I use git-sync, and on iOS I set up Automation Shortcuts that run automatically to push/pull in Working Copy every time Obsidian app is opened or closed.
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I was a “one vault” person. However, after using Obsidian for 16 months, I had way too much stuff in my first vault to be able to use it efficiently. (I was surprised that I only had 514 notes; it seemed more.)
My workflow became too complex. I needed to search for items and scroll, scroll, scroll… Worst of all, I felt overwhelmed. I procrastinated way more than I should.
Plus, I found myself avoiding adding useful notes to Obsidian. I put these notes into Evernote instead.
Finally, I decided that I needed more vaults.
So now I have three. My original primary vault, with two additional vaults for project-related materials.
Whew! It’s a huge relief. I’m back to working efficiently and enjoying Obsidian with three vaults. 
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I use one vault for my clients and all relevant information to do with them / their cases (I’m a therapist) and one vault for everything else.
In the “everything else” vault (mainly handling with thoughts and content I consume / process) I have some folders such as “admin”, which for the moment is organising general admin / life reference docs. If this or other folders get too huge, I would just make another vault and move them there.
In this way I’m preparing myself for the potential future problem of ending up with way too many notes in one vault - like Angela99’s response above me - but enabling a simple way of moving general “safe” categories of notes to a new vault to declutter if needs be.
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I think that’s the key issue for you here.
From outside, a vault is just a folder. From inside it governs searches, graphs, suggestions, links, tag panes etc. And the same settings apply to everything in the vault.
It’s a (permeable) barrier. Similar to the way the database programs (Evernote, Roam etc) limit the information they work with, except that none of it is locked up. I’m not aware that the devs have ever explained why they chose this structure, but it is presumably to do with speed and performance.
You can choose to do that. Many people do.
Tossing is a rather pejorative word in this context, suggesting that you have already decided what works best for you.
With different vauts, you can have differents configurations for differents projects. I really like Obsidian for this features : you can define differents parameters fort differents vaults. You can separate projects as well.
I have my Zettlekasten in one of them but I don’t want it to be mixed with my Encyclopedia from my novels, which is also a vault by itself. I also write my novels inside Obsidian in a separate vaults, as I don’t want to mix up my long form writing awaiting for publishing with my worldbuilding or my zettles. It is not like folders at all, it is a separate window with different assets.
My encyclopedia needs some features, my zettle other ones and my novels writing need something quite differents from the others. When I work with my Zettlekasten, I don’t want to be distracted with the amount of work awaiting in my novels. When I write my novels, I don’t need to be distracted with every articles awaiting in my Zettlekasten. And when I build my univers, the set of features and CSS parameters are quite differents from the one I set for writing my books.
You can also accomplish some feature differences using workspaces, if you want to keep some different notes in one vault. For example, perhaps pane layout and note templates are different for your encyclopedia and the novel writing.
As with everything, there’s a couple ways to do most things in Obsidian.
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No it would not be enough. I use the folder structure to compose my novels, differents features for my encyclopedia, CSS snippets are not the same. Layout and templating are not the point here. So I could not use Obisdian like this if vaults was mixed up. I have already tried a lot of things.
As the question was “why using multiple vaults” my answer is “because it is usefull in a lot of cases, for mine for example”.
I prefer a single valut.
Also worried about the overload of files, which affects the experience of daily use, especially the search/auto-suggestions.
Although nesting is not officially supported, I can’t think of a better way to do it.
My current approach is to create separate vault by year, and then have a global vault with all the years.
For daily use, only the year sub-vault is used.
When using the global vault, avoid manipulating files that belong to sub-vault and also exclude synchronization of sub-vault files.
I am still a bit concerned that the nesting will make files lost or corrupted.
I don’t know about better, but one possibility is to use large files.
Files have the advantage of retaining their internal structure and sort order and access to all the features programs have for working within a file. And linking etc is as automatic and nearly as quick (link to headers and blocks). But not graph presumably - idk because I never use it anyway.
Always worth remembering that an atomic note can as easily be a bullet, block or header as a separate file.
I started using long files when I realised they were the best solution for longform writing. I then realised I could do the same with my atomic notes. Converting via opml gives an amazingly useful kanban overview in Workflowy.
I still use nested vaults - and still never had a list or corrupted file or needed to resort to backups - but I now have fewer files.
This file overwhelm is real. The majority of my searches are either in Daily Note stuff or in atomic stuff.
All my Daily Note stuff is nested with People and Projects and Orgs under a Things folder.
All my atomic stuff is under a Notes or Spaces folder, so I can use path: (or -path:) plus sort order to make it easier to find what I’m looking for.
Very new to the app. My main reason for keeping one vault is that my tasks span my work and personal lives and I use [[links]] to notes about each. If there was a way to autocomplete among the various vaults I would split. I know I can do with the obsidian: links but it is a pain to switch, get the link, etc. Seems from the discussion that lots of folks want/need inter-vault linking and then we’d have a more flexible work structure ability.
I’d suggest that for autocomplete is the user types “/” as the first character ( or some other character) obsidian give a list of vaults and then prompt from the selected vault for the completion. Also, and import/export vault would be useful. Export copies the tree from a selected folder to a new directory and makes it a vault, copying the .obsidian folder. Import adds a vault as a folder and removes the .obsidian file.
You’d need to open each vault at least once when you copy things to a different platform (external sync not obsidian sync) but that isn’t something you’d be doing often.
If you have inter-vault links, you don’t have vaults
Don’t understand your comments. Since we already have an obsidian: URI, we have intervault links. They don’t automatically readjust but wouldn’t clicking one in a
another vault link open the other vault and item? as I said, new and havent tried that but seems it ought to work
TL;DR: Considerations in favour of multiple vaults not already mentioned above:
-
having Safe Mode on in the main vault while making use of community plugins within nested vaults—though I’m sure this is meager protection against a compromised plugin;
-
clarity of maintaining separate
gitrepositories for different categories of notes, though the repositories could simply reside in non-overlapping subdirectories of a single vault, or overlapping repositories managed using.gitignoreas per @quinncom’s setup.
I’ve been using nested symlinked vaults on macOS for some months and am happy to report no data loss. I hope this means Obsidian is close to supporting nesting and symlinks, rather than that I’m lucky.
I used to keep my Zettel in a subdirectory of my single vault, but moved them into a new vault for reasons already mentioned above: performance and keeping a clean Zettelkasten vault.
The Zk vault is symlinked into the main vault so that for as long as Obsidian can handle it (so far so good), I can work in the main vault and freely wikilink Zettel from anywhere (though Zettel are only ever wikilinked to other Zettel). When this is distracting (e.g. as described by @Lithou), I can open the Zk vault separately. (A small shell script invokes rsync to keep the contents of .obsidian/themes synched.)
Besides the Zk vault, I now have a couple other nested vaults in which I’ve enabled community plugins (mostly to make use of Dataview), whereas I prefer to keep Safe Mode on in the main vault.
I’ve also symlinked in some directories which I don’t intent to open as Obsidian vaults. The purpose of these is to maintain separate git backups and revision histories; not dissimilar to @quinncom’s setup, though I’ve excluded the nested vaults by symlinking them in rather than using .gitignore. (By default, git doesn’t follow symlinks, which is convenient in this context.) I prefer to keep the vaults unnested in the filesystem because I can clearly see the various repositories which make up my main vault.
Relative symlinks are preferable to absolute ones, especially if one is synching across devices. For example, given these directories:
/users/ada/vaults
/users/ada/vaults/main
/users/ada/vaults/nested
one would want to:
cd /users/ada/vaults/main
ln -s ../nested nested
not:
ln -s /users/ada/vaults/nested /users/ada/vaults/main/nested
in case, for example, one is synching to another device which doesn’t use the directory structure /users/ada, or vaults is renamed Vaults.
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idk about symlinks, but I doubt it will ever support nested vaults. The devs know that a significant number of supporters use them, so I hope it won’t now change the program in a way that makes them malfunction. The issue with nested vaults is that they bring opportunities for careless or wilful users to muck up their linking system, and there’s no way of designing around that. Saying that they are unsupported gives Obsidian a way of telling users that it’s on their own heads if they use them and muck it up. The same way the Safe Mode notice makes it clear that using community plugins is a users decision. In practice, plugins can bring (have brought) data losses that nesting doesn’t, as well as the possibility of destroying the linking system - but plugins can always be turned off centrally once the problem is realised.
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