Will one Vault suffice for all of University?

Knowledge management
1

Hello Obsidian Community, this is my first post and I have been using Obsidian for nearly two weeks and I absolutely love it.

Aside from a free-time Vault I also want to use Obsidian for University. This means that I have created a Vault for each course I currently have booked. While this keeps it tidy and is easy to manage, I feel like I am barely using some of the best functions of Obsidian (like of course internal linking), and these I would get by creating only one Vault for all of university.

Now my question: how manageable would a Vault be that accomodates all of university (or at least only separating my major and my minor) down the line? Assuming I create a new main-note every week for every course for a few years, with additional notes created if I for example want to have a separate note explaining “Utilitarianism” that can by internally linked to multiple courses and notes?

Is this manageable? If not, should I create separate vaults for slightly smaller areas (Instead one for my major, Philosophy, maybe three for theoretical, practical and history of philosophy each) and just live with the fact that certain things wont be internally linked between these areas? Or should I stay with one Vault per course?

And lastly: If you say that I should just try it out, how easy is it to undo the Vault and manually separate and structure it in a few years (once it would become unmanageable)?

Thank you in advance!

2

You have many options

  • Nested vaults (everything in one vault, but also in their own separate vaults);
  • Heavy use of links and MOCs;
  • Tags;
  • Zettelkasten (works best if there’s some possibility of links between all notes imo);
  • Etc etc.

You can use them all or just one.

3

Ok, going from these:

  • Tags seem to be something to test out (I am still such a novice with Obsidian).
  • Nested vaults seem a bit dangerous for someone still coming to grips with regular Obsidian (I just read your other post).
  • Is there some place you recommend I’d start when looking into MOCs and Zettelkasten?
4

If you start with one vault, but design your folder system to allow the possibility in future, then you have all the advantages with no risk from inexperience. All you’d have to do in future to start it is open folder as vault. Works best when there’s clear space between the contents of each vault.

Or start with separate vaults with future option of moving them into a single empty vault.

5

Why not just one vault for everything? You can use folders. I’m a teacher at the university and I keep a folder for everything related to that with sub-folders for courses and sub-folders for term. I also use bested tags for the courses like: ’’’#course/vt21” (vt meaning spring-term 2021).

1 Like
6

That is what I had hoped to hear :slight_smile: Using Tags and clever linking is enough to keep everything sufficiently tidy then (maybe even graph-view)?

And if I may ask again, if it becomes too much I can always manually shuffle around the folders and markdown files outside of Obsidian right?

7

Yes. Though best to understand the linking system you have been using before doing it outside of Obsidian; there can be a few pitfalls with those. I’ve never had a problem, but I’m permanently aware because I use nesting.

8

Thanks! With that my questions are answered :slight_smile: