Super vault: point Obsidian at an entire drive; auto-discover and index only the vaults within

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

AI agents are increasingly generating and maintaining wiki-style Markdown knowledge bases directly inside large existing folder trees (project folders, cloud-synced drives, document archives). Obsidian is the natural human interface for this content — but its vault model assumes the vault root is a dedicated notes folder that gets fully indexed.

Pointing Obsidian at a root folder containing ~1M files, of which only a small percentage are Markdown notes scattered across the tree, overwhelms indexing: extremely slow startup, heavy memory use, and re-index churn. The alternative — registering each Markdown pocket as its own vault — doesn’t scale either: it fragments links/search/graph and Obsidian has no way to manage hundreds or thousands of vaults.

Proposed solution

A “super vault” mode when opening very large trees:

  • Vault auto-discovery: scan the tree for folders bearing the markings of a vault (e.g., an .obsidian subfolder) and include/index only those subtrees. This keeps each vault’s non-.md attachments — which notes may link to — while ignoring everything outside discovered vaults at the scanner level, not just hidden in UI.
  • Lazy/incremental indexing: index discovered vaults on demand as they’re visited, with a persistent cache so restarts don’t rescan the whole tree.
  • Files outside discovered vaults remain linkable/openable on demand.

This would let one vault span an entire drive-sized tree while doing work proportional to the embedded vaults, not the total file count.

Current workaround (optional)

Opening each embedded vault separately (loses cross-linking, unmanageable at hundreds of vaults), or “Excluded files” (files are still indexed, just filtered from results).

Related feature requests (optional)