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.
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 git repositories for different categories of notes, though the repositories could simply reside in non-overlapping subdirectories of a single vault, or overlapping repositories managed using .gitignore as 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.
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.
Try it.
No, you don’t.
The way Obsidian works is to load the content of a vault into memory, so that linking, link suggestions etc are very fast. That works because the vault has a boundary around what is loaded. Take away the boundary, and it’s no longer a vault.
Let’s say you’re trying to find your keys. You set your room robot to find them. Search time 1 second. Not there, so you set your house robot to work. Search time 10 seconds. Not there, so kick the robot outside and tell it to search the universe. Search time ???
If you want the type of intervault links you describe, just have one vault and use folders.
I’ll offer a simple idea that is still hypothetical to me (ie not tried and tested), but I can’t see anyone else having mentioned: Several vaults make it possible to collaborate with other people.
You can have a dedicated vault for your collective second brain in a certain group. A second hive mind, perhaps. There are many groups in my own and probably your life too, where knowledge is distributed in less compartmentalised ways than formal organisations. There is no one in particular being responsible for this or that. And you would like to keep it that way, because the group is based less on productivity and more on conviviality for example (there are many other reasons why formal roles are to be shunned in certain contexts, I’m sure you can think of some too). For example, I share an office and atelier with a few dozen of people. We are more friends than we are colleagues, but most importantly, we are equals and if anyone has a certain responsibility (where managing knowledge becomes an issue), that responsibility would almost certainly rotate on to another person at some point (which makes that knowledge management a temporary task, and you risk not accumulating formal knowledge, having to start over or translating the highly idiosyncratic PKM system from the former person). We could aso have a vault together. Obsidian doesn’t have to be personal knowledge management, it’s just a knowledge base and such a base could be used by several people. The reason why having separate vaults in this case appeals to me is exactly because linking between vaults is inhibited. Your personal vault would not shared by default and you have control over how the people in your life can pick your brain.
Hey guys,
has anyone considered implementing scopes or namespaces in Obsidian?
Let’s say I have one vault with 3 folders:
When I write JS notes, I don’t usually need link suggestions for Books. For example, my JS Date object note (aliased as “date”) suggests links to few related mentions in JS and PHP notes and dozens of hits in my book notes.
My PHP notes often get confused with JS notes (“Arrays” notes exist in both folders). Autocomplete shows folder the notes are in so I can manually pick the correct one, but it’s an extra click. Outgoing links and backlinks also show much more hits than I’d prefer. It’s not a deal breaker but it makes me feel overwhelmed, disorganized.
I considered using separate vaults, but then I wouldn’t be able to, for example, keep my Eloquent JavaScript book notes in Books folder or link to JSON from both JS and PHP notes.
What I’m suggesting is allowing to set namespace for each note (even simply in YAML header) and then limit or prioritize link hints (and ideally search in general) to the namespace of current note. One note might have multiple namespaces. This namespacing could be turned on and off. It might even hide files in file panel that aren’t part of the namespace. It would make my note taking much more streamlined.
What do you think?
Do you mean like being able to use paths or tags to include or exclude what appears in the autocomplete?
That sounds kind of awesome setting it at the note level. This could make backlinks especially awesomer.
(With backlinks, you can select the magnifying glass and use Obsidian’s standard search criteria to limit or filter backlinks. This isn’t available with outgoing links, though it’s probably a lot less necessary for those.)
Kinda, yes. For example, Intellij IDEs implement scopes like this: Scopes and file colors
They use GUI to pick which files and folders go to which scope. But perhaps simple YAML header might be enough for a test run in Obsidian. It feels like it might not be hard to implement.
Thanks for pasting in the link so I could try it out. You’ve given me a quick way of testing both multiple vaults AND what looks like a general way to link INTO Obsidian – without the usual google search, then reading 50 forum posts for the nugget.
Yes, I’m starting to see a slowdown on startup (including up to 30 seconds of re-indexing messages) at 16,000 files after 3 months of Obsidian. Keep in mind, I am probably not the typical user, as I have full books, and thousands of local images.
Since I’m planning to integrate all my work documentation as well – including detailed database table/column metadata and more full books into Obsidian, I’m going to have to either have a Personal/Work split – or more likely since – like someone else said --personal and work are so intertwined, a Level1Detail/Level2Detail split.
I’m envisioning a method like my old Encyclopedia Brittanica’s from 1985 – you might recall…the blue set was a reference that had low detail, but quicker to lookup information, that “linked” out to the full articles in the red-colored volumes.
I know I should use links out to files using plugins like the PDF and Readwise links, but I’m going to plow ahead with the All-In-Obsidian plan. I know I’m probably heading to a vault redesign in 3-6 months, but I’ll learn some hard lessons along the way :-).
I have a question. I’ve used one vault up until now. I recently got a job where I often need to use knowledge from my notes. The workplace gives me a laptop to use and I have created a vault there to write notes. I could synchronize with my original vault, as I already do between my private laptop and stationary computer at home. But I don’t want to have my whole second brain on my work computer for privacy reasons – only the notes relevant to work. How could this be possible? I wish I could pick out a list or folder of notes in my original vault and only synchronize those between my private vault and my work vault. So when I go to work and add something to those notes, they are also up-to-date when I get home and open up those same notes for non-work purposes. Any ideas?
I synch only parts of my vault for a similar reason. You can control what folders do or don’t synch.
Thanks for the suggestion. The problem is: I’m already synching my private vault via Nextcloud between my private laptop and private stationary PC. My third computer is at work. Are you saying I can synch only parts of my vault with that one?