Switching from Notion to Obsidian?

Hello everyone.

I’m considering switching from Notion to Obsidian.

The things I use Notion for mostly are
1: Daily journaling.
2: Finance/Budget tracker.
3:Reading list/summaries/ Highlights. I also use Readwise with my Notion account.

Question 1:
Is it possible to create a file/vault etc in Obsidian that has daily prompts, that way I don’t have to write them out every day?

Question 2:
I downloaded a budget tracker from a Youtuber called Redgregory. It is pretty good as it calculates monthly expenses and I can easily keep track of income and expenses, it’s a simple table. Can I do something similar in Obsidian?

Question 3:
Because Obsidian is stored locally and not in the cloud, like Notion. Storage is a concern. My laptop is only 250GB. Would backing it up to iCloud/GGdrive be an option?

Best Regards!

I don’t feel fully qualified to answer all your questions, but I’ll do my best.

  1. Probably. Probably with something like Templater, or maybe with the use of some external tool like a Python script or something. I think there are lots of people on these forums who could help you build something like that if you really wanted to.

By the way, I understand this question to mean you want a different prompt every day, sortof like a thought or reflection of the day.

  1. I think this is something where Notion is probably better than Obsidian, at least out of the box. Notion has done a lot with databases, whereas Obsidian is somewhat necessarily limited because it’s built on the idea of the simplicity of Markdown, which is just plain text. Markdown simply doesn’t involve mathematical computation like a database or spreadsheet does. That said, you could take a look at the plugin Advanced Tables and maybe some other users can chime in here. I think in general, a lot can be done with Obsidian but it takes plugins, or the expertise of users on the forum, or both, if you want to do anything that extends Obsidian far past its base usage.

  2. Obsidian reads the text files (and image files, and PDFs) in the folders on your computer. So, if you can back up those items (which, you can, with iCloud/GGdrive, etc), you can back up the files you will work with in Obsidian. That said, if you have any intention of using Obsidian on your phone, Obsidian Sync (a paid service) is really nice (I use it).

Hey!
Thanks for your reply!

In regards to the journaling question. I don’t need different prompts each day. I like to keep it simple

Three things I’m grateful for.
What would make today good?
How am I feeling etc?

Stuff like that. I guess templater or the daily notes plug-in would work? Is learning code necessary for using Obsidian?

Best regards.

Hello! You’re very welcome.

Daily Notes could definitely do what you’re asking for, easily. What you’re asking for is simple, so I would stick with that plugin for that need. I don’t use Templater, but from what I’ve seen in the forums, it is: a) powerful, and b) complex. Daily prompts that don’t change is not complex.

Learning code is not necessary. Markdown is a markup language, you just “mark up” text to alter the way it looks (bold, italic, make it a header) and to indicate links and such. The editor we’re using to talk to each other uses Markdown for its editing options:

image

This is a Markdown image link (the same screenshot image above):
![image|592x38](upload://d2bExl5BGQc5VLJCcul044BKLrS.png)

A lot of this is handled for you in Obsidian, but you’re free to manually type things in yourself, because it’s fast and easy.

If you haven’t yet, take a look at the Help file for Obsidian.

Also, don’t know if you took a look, but Advanced Tables does have a formulas feature.

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