#1

Hi,

I am in the process of migrating information. I have an extensive Journal with over 6000 entries, and art which I would like to provide with metadata about the drawings. On top of that I want to do some kind of knowledge management on videos I watch, books I read and such.

I value the Random Note plugin, but I can kind of guess the odds when I select a random note, it will most likely bring me to a Journal note (6000 vs. 1200 art, vs. 100? for knowledge).

I was finding ways around it, and one is stacking Obsidian vaults and I wonder if this is a good or bad idea. The idea is like follows

- Main Vault
  - Drawing Vault
  - Journal Vault
  - Knowledge Vault

When I an working on notes for my drawings (art, art references, tutorial) that becomes my “area of focus”. I do not think there will be any knowledge that needs to be linked, but you never know!

So when I open the main vault, Obsidian will index all notes, and I can interconnect. When I open the Drawing Vault, only notes that are on that level downwards are indexed and linked.

Is this feasible, and won’t part of Obsidian break? Ideally I want to have “Areas” in Obsidian where I can hide information that I am not interested in while being focused on distinct areas.

Coming from Evernote with Notebooks and Stacks, searching can be limited to a single notebook as well, I guess that is the analogy.

#2

Just a thought on your remark:

Isn’t that a “limitation”?

When you would be able to access all your other notes in the other (sub)vaults your “second brain” would expand over all your vaults and you would be able to make connections that your normally wouldn’t see in your approach.

I do see were you want to go though and I do respect your idea of putting everything in pre-configured “baskets” (read vaults). I also belief this would lead us into a semantical discussion on how to implement PKM systems. I already explained in some other posts everyone needs to make a workflow that best fits his/her needs.

Personally, I am not a big fan of putting things in boxes. It is against (again in my living world) what the PKM-idea wants to achieve: roughly put -> Put everything on a big pile, give the users some possibility to link items (in different directions), give them a visual overview of the - what you call - area and finally let them use all those tools to make new notes that gathers the information for a certain research question valid at that moment in time.

The ‘pile’ would be viewed in a totally different way when trying to figure out an answer to another research question at another moment in time. That’s the beauty of the system.

Don’t think putting things in boxes will let you achieve the same results.

Not wanting to be a “preacher” or an “evangelist” to be perfectly clear. Just trying to help expand ideas and thinking methods…

#3

When I combine everything (not against it) the random notes plugin will become quite useless as my journal entries are a “static” representation of the day I lived, highlights or events. The rest of my knowledge notes can change, made more atomic and morph.

In this case I see the Random Note plugin like a way to re-read / restructure or rewrite old knowledge. If I press a random note in this case and I have 6000 written journal entries (they are now in Journey) and 1900 drawings (also quite static, just metadata, but for collection purposes in Obsidian), the 100 knowledge notes have a low chance of popping up.

Thank you for your insight and I might be seeing problems that are not there, and tags might work as well. I was trying to do a thought experiment, and see what options are out there.

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#4

Adding a filter to the random note tool would be great. E.g only notes in a given folder or containing certain title text, or the inverse.

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#5

The devs do not endorse nested vaults. There can be issues when files are renamed or moved and links not properly updating. This is especially true if you have notes with the same name.

Beyond that, I’ll echo the benefit of using one vault. Obsidian’s search and filter capabilities are already very good with operators to search by folder, by tag, etc. Some expected future features are graph filtering and embeddable search, which allow you to see search results in more useful ways.

I agree that adding a filter to the Random Note plugin is a great feature request, and once the plugin API opens up, there could be a variety of note exploration plugins.

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#6

+1 to that

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