Tips for maintaining two (or more) vaults?

Knowledge management
1

I started using Obsidian in about 2022, and during that whole time I’ve only ever used one vault. There’s only one of me, and I only have one brain, so why use two and make things more complicated?

But now the time has come when I need to split my vault in two: One for work, run on my employer’s OneDrive, and one for everything else — my personal projects, community activities, health, finance and so on.

Those of you who use two or more vaults: Please give me some tips on your best practices for running smoothly? How do you keep plugins and settings in sync — or do you even bother with that?

Also, can I run Obsidian with a vault in OneDrive from an iPhone and iPad? Does that work?

Also, if anyone has pointers on using Obsidian with Microsoft apps, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks!

2

I have two vaults with two separate needs, one for work and one for home, like yourself.

I recommend against using it with OneDrive simply because OneDrive has occasional issues with not properly handling the frequent file changes for apps that auto-save (OneNote has similar issues, as do other tools, so it’s not limited to Obsidian).

If you want to keep a backup on OneDrive, I’d recommend setting up a nightly Powershell (or even robocopy) script to archive your vault, keeping 7 (a week’s worth) and removing older archives. They’re still backed up to OneDrive, but without the headache of potentially losing data due to OneDrive being, well, OneDrive.

As for plugins, I have different sets of plugins because I have different needs on them, but I also don’t use a lot of plugins to start with. Once they’re set up, though, they typically just keep chugging along, so it’s a one-and-done situation as opposed to an ongoing maintenance task. Probably not a big issue unless you’re using a huge number of plugins.

3

I’m on the Mac so PowerShell and robocopy are probably not options but I expect OneDrive has the same problems for me so that is an excellent tip.

4

I started with a single vault and later split it into two (Education & Personal)

The actual reason was to sync only one vault to a specific device, but it also had the benefit of cutting down on some plugins. Both vaults having their own purpose means they don’t need to have the same plugins, so I don’t bother keeping plugins synced between them.

As for syncing, may I suggest MEGA or Koofr?
Both have generous free tier with file versioning. Koofr also supports webdav, so you can sync via Remotely save if you want to.

5

I think I setup my work vault manually, but for initial setup you can copy the .obsidian folder to get all the same settings. My work vault has a different, simpler setup from my personal vault, so there’s not much to keep in sync. On the off times I want to make a setting change to both, I do it manually.

I believe the Remotely Save plugin can sync to it (tho it sounds like that may be a moot point).

1 Like
6

It’s just theorycrafting, but i don’t see why it would not work. Maybe i even change my setup accordingly :smiley:

In principle you have one vault just as you have now. Within this vault you have 3 sections: 1. private 2. office 3. shared data.

Unified Vault
├── private/
├── office/
└── shared/

You could use a software that selects parts of the unified folder and mirrors them to some different folder. Last i checked you could not have multiple vaults at the same root-folder while ignoring parts within it. But maybe someone came up with a plugin for that :person_shrugging: That’s why i suggest this solution.

This gives you these two additional vaults/ Folders:

Office Vault
├── office/
└── shared/

Private Vault
├── private/
└── shared/

I love syncthing for that task. It mirrors data between two different folders. Doesn’t matter if on the same or different machines. If they’re on different machines, i think they have to be in the same network. But possibly different networks should work with some setup aswell.s

The shared folder has stuff like:

  • .obsidian (plugins, themes, snippets, hotexys, templates
  • templates
  • shared files (for example a zettelkasten that is used in both contexts as a reference)
  • to-do lists
  • …

You will have to exclude some files though:

  • workspace.json (never ever sync this if you have different vaults. It’ll fuck up the interface)
  • workspace-mobile.json

possibly also

  • plugin cache folders
  • graph cache
  • transient UI state

This makes a split: the logical vault != physical vault.

This way you can work in your unified vault just as you did before. The other vaults get the data they need automatically

The “office vault” gets copied to your office cloud via nextcloud, google drive, one drive or whatever. Your private stuff never touches that cloud. You could technically set it up on different machines:

rasperryPI/private: unified vault

office-machine: work vault

private-machine: private vault

This way your office-machine never gets private data and the other way around. That might actually be important regarding data-security.

Some things to consider:

  • The mirroring of the folders can lead to sync-conflicts, if you are working at different vaults on the same files at the same time.
  • Editing a file while a large amount of files gets synced might lead to a conflict (assuming the file is part of the big group)
  • Links:
    • Image having one file in /private that links to a file in /office. While you are in the unified vault, it does not matter. But if in the private vault it just points into nothingness. I’d make it a iron rule: If something is touching both private and office, it goes into "shared” and it avoids linking to either /private or /office. My recommendation would be to just work in the unified vault habitually. And if for any reason (for example a different work-machine) you have to use your office-vault, you just don’t click on orphaned links. Because this would lead to sync-conflicts.
  • It’s also important that the root of all vaults is at the same level: example: /shared/template/daily-todo.mdhas to be the same in each of the vaults. Basically: Don’t let the segmented vault point it /privat/, but at / (root of the unified vault)
  • Indexing might be troublesome.
    • Some plugins might not work
    • Some Plugins index the vault whenever it is opened. Don’t switch often between the vaults
    • The Search might return weird results in the “small vaults” regarding backlinks, if you don’t watch out regarding the link-issue mentioned above.

___

Alternatively you could just use symlinks. But that’ll likely cause more trouble. Especially on windows. But you have no sync-conflicts, and duplications.

1 Like
7

Hi! Do you know if iCloud would be more reliable than OneDrive? Alternatively, Google Drive or DropBox? Are there any guides on how to set a vault there? I don’t want to use GDrive/DropBox to back up my Mac (iCloud is fine for that). I just want a cozy place for my remote vault :blush:

8

for iPhone/iPad specifically, iCloud is usually the least weird option because Obsidian on iOS expects its iCloud-synced vaults inside the Obsidian app container.

The practical setup I’d use is:

  1. create the vault from Obsidian on iOS first, so it makes the right iCloud folder
  2. on the Mac, open that same folder as a vault
  3. double-check you did not accidentally create a nested Vault/Vault/... folder — that one bites people a lot

I’d be more cautious with OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive as the live mobile vault location. They can be fine as desktop sync/backup layers, but iOS file-provider sync is not quite the same as “Obsidian has a normal local folder it can rely on.” Whatever provider you choose, I’d keep version history/backups turned on.