I guess if there are no sensible or useful links between two or more different areas of interest there’s no value putting them in one vault and it may even confuse things. For example I’m learning French and have a separate vault for that. The words, definitions, verb tables in there are essentially “random words” that do not need linking to the rest of my stuff and would only cause confusion!
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I use one universal vault. I have “archived” vaults that will get refactored into my new vault.
In your example I just might do the same, but I think there are very few exceptions. The problem with that logic is you assume you can judge the existence of a valuable overlap between field beforehand. Experience tells everyone that if you continue to explore and engage yourself in two separate fields, you will start to notice links between them. As long as those fields are in separate vaults those links can’t happen in the way Obsidian makes it possible. The power of one vault is you can get maximally surprised by your own thinking.
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Files on disk are not encrypted.
If you have only one vault and you have personal and work stuffs, they will be blended.
If you install Obsidian on your work computer and your administrator can access your computer at any moment, having only one vault will give him access to all your personal stuffs.
With more than one vault, you can on your work computer create a vault that will contains only work stuff that you don’t mind if your administrator access them.
You can create only one vault and focus on one folder when thinking and writing.
Thanks again for your thoughts @mlte, I’ve been happily using syncthing for my main vault (which I merged from two separate ‘work’ and ‘personal’ vaults using the folder method that you outlined) for about 1.5 years.
Conveniently, I’ve been in school for that time period, so haven’t had to actually worry about the confidentiality of the ‘Personal’ vault, but as I finish up school, I’m wondering this: how do you actually ensure the Personal folder can’t be synced to the Work computer?. I considered nested vaults and per-device exclusion patterns, but both of these seem to be impossible/bad ideas.
The best I’ve come up with is multiple syncthing folder shares for the different components of the vault (.git, .obsidian, 01_Intake, 02_Personal, 03_Work) witholding the sensitive folders from syncing to work devices. .git and obsidian “file recovery” should not be synced in this scenario, since they may contain private info.
Hi @senorvalenz - you’re asking how I make sure that ‘Personal’ vault is compartmentalized from ‘Work’ vault and not synchronized. From the beginning I only synchronize the particular vaults with my work computer.
My tree basically still looks the same now.
The whole tree sits in a folder. On a daily basis, when I work at home, I open up that top folder, so I see everything.
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Incoming - synced between private mobile, privat laptop. On a weekly basis, I move notes to the vaults where they belong.
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Private - synced between private mobile, privat laptop. These notes are just for me.
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Pick my brain - not synced, but I use this folder to open up my Obsidian when I am with other people outside of a work context. This excludes my private notes and Incoming (which might contain private notes), but contain everything else.
2A. General - synced between private mobile, privat laptop
2B. Work - synced between private mobile, privat laptop, work mobile, work laptop. When I use Obsidian at work, I only see this vault and my devices cannot get access or sync up with the rest of my tree. When I create new notes, they automatically get put in 2B Work, so I don’t need to move those notes.
I use four vaults for completely different work areas. And I’m always annoyed that I have to go to each vault separately for updates and search separately for updates for the design and for the plugins. Then I press “update” in four vaults in two sections each. And I do the whole thing again on my laptop and on my cell phone. That’s complete nonsense.
I was a multiple-vault person in the past, but now everything is in one vault.
Most of the benefits of having multiple vaults I don’t need anymore:
- Different Themes: I don’t use themes. I’m a “Default” guy.
- Different sets of plugins: I don’t use community plugins. They’re disabled.
- Separate projects: I found that my “separate projects” tend to start bleeding over into each other, so it makes sense to have them all in one vault.
But, my workflow is pretty specialized. There are certain core features I don’t even use and have turned off, such as:
- Canvas - anything I might do in canvas, I generally wind up doing in mermaid because I’ve used it for so many years and I’m intimately familiar with it.
- Daily notes - I have no need for daily notes. If I want to timestamp something, I have a small template that inserts a timestamp as a tag inline and then I just start typing under it.
- Graph View - this has never benefited me in any meaningful way.
- Unique Note Creator - same reasons as Daily Notes
- Web Viewer - Never used it, so finally disabled it.
I guess you could call me an Obsidian purist. I’m pretty much that way with most software anyway.
There’s a feature request about that which you can support (if you haven’t already): Global Settings / Same settings, themes, and plugins across multiple vaults.