The topic of using a single Obsidian Vault or multiple Vaults comes up quite often. I started off using one, I now have three, and soon I will have four. Yes, I’ve gone to the dark side¹. I’d like to share how I got here.
In the beginning, there was one
My sister Janet was a long-time Dynalist user, and she told me about Obsidian a couple of times. I finally installed it last year and when I launched it the first time, all I saw was a big black screen like this:
Create new vault? Open folder as vault? FTW is a vault?
I was having flashbacks to when we brought our son home from the hospital the day after he was born. After what was a horrendous birth for my wife and our son, we brought home our precious and fragile little angel.
We took him out of the car, oh so gently, and placed him in the cute wicker bassinet on top of the living room table. Exhausted, we looked at each other and said:
“OK, what do we do now?”
Knowing Obsidian could not possibly be as scary as bringing a baby home, I launched it several more times over the next few weeks. It took me a couple of times to understand the following:
A vault is just a folder on your computer!
I don’t know why they just don’t call it what it is: a folder. A vault is no more secure than a folder, it has no special abilities beyond a folder, it’s just a place to keep some hidden files on your computer. Sure, it keeps its configuration, and extensions in there but most importantly it’s a folder where you can see your notes in plain sight.
I know what a vault is, now what?
Once I’d figured out what a vault was, I still needed to know what to do next. Sure, it’s completely obvious in hindsight but I stared at this, the second screen and another black hole:
A lot of people online tell you:
Just start taking notes!
Great advice but I had nothing to take notes on right away, so I copy and pasted my notes out of Fastmail³, from the notes I had on my Nextcloud⁴ server, and the .txt files on my file server. I was off to the races with my vault and hundreds of note files!
This single vault (ahem, folder) approach worked well for about six months. My ADHD-ish brain needed a separation of concerns.
My first baby vault was born
Most of the notes that I had been creating during that time were related to my Note App review hobby². To date, there are 463 files in my Note Apps folder, and that does not include the 324 people or 58 organization Markdown files that I have in other folders, i.e. sub-folders under the main vault folder!
I realized that I had some discrete projects and that I was being distracted by the other folders and files in my vault when I was supposed to be focused on the projects. Obsidian on its own could be a hobby. Digging into the tool more, sharing my learning, and maybe creating a vault in GitHub. So, I decided it needed its own home, yes an Obsidian vault about Obsidian!
This post is born out of one of the files in that vault. I have several additional ideas and I’m considering publishing the entire vault. Once I learned about Obsidian Hub⁵ though, that de-prioritized this project.
I’ve had multiple vaults for a couple of months now and have found that it works well for me. Below are some of the pros and cons that I’ve found with multiple vaults.
Pros and Cons
Here are some of the pros of using multiple vaults:
- Allows me to have a stronger separation between projects
- I can prepare in one vault and move to another with a simple copy and paste or move the file
- Don’t have to worry about accidentally publishing my personal notes if I ever start using Obsidian Publish
- My private notes don’t get mixed up with project notes
- I can manually sync a vault if I need to quickly work on another device
- If I’m in a project vault, the other notes don’t distract me
- I can have different themes on each vault which means I use them for longer periods of time. The vault has its own “personality”
And here are the cons:
- Unable to create [[wiki links]] between files in different vaults
- Two places with Daily notes
- When I use the
Share tofeature of Android to share a Web page or file to Obsidian, I can’t choose which vault the file goes into. It just opens the most recent vault. - Must customize keyboard shortcuts on each vault or figure out how to copy the settings over
- Must customize the toolbar items and make sure they are in the same order so when switching vaults there’s less friction
And then there were three
That’s where I’m at as of today in my Obsidian vault journey. I’ve gone from a single vault to three vaults:
- Notes — Note Apps notes (reviews, people, organizations), personal notes (family, health, finances, friends, house stuff), technology (software development, trends), ideas (inventions, project ideas), knowledge management, and now my job search!
- Obsidian — plugins, themes, resources, tips, and tricks
- IoT — a previous hobby where I created a global map of IoT companies. Most of the data is in a Mongo DB but thinking to migrate it to Markdown and publish in Git Hub
What’s next?
My focus right now is finding the next full time job although hoping I will take some breaks and maintain this new hobby.
As far as my vaults go, I will split the big “Notes” vault into at least two vaults: Note Apps and everything else. As I learn more, I will aim to update this post.
I’ve included some links to this topic including a few from r/ObsidianMD which I find a lot slower-paced than the Obsidian Discord server. Just like Discord, the people on reddit are friendly and helpful.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I thank each and every one of you for the comments and insights on Obsidian. It’s been a blast so far.
Happy vaulting!
References
- Last night I went to the dark side and created a 2nd Obsidian vault (basically a folder) for my Obsidian notes, Stone, 2022–08–24
- Why this rabbit hole? Stone, 2021–09–25
- Fastmail Notes, Online Help
- Nextcloud, own your data
- Obsidian Hub, an experimental vault maintained by the Obsidian community
- Working with multiple vaults, Obsidian Help
- One vault vs multiple vaults, Obsidian Forum
- Should I create 1 vault or multiple vaults for the multiple things I want to learn. ObsidianMD, u/BroksiMD, 2022–08–25
- Is it worthwhile having multiple vaults for somewhat different things?, u/17thParadise, 2022–09–15
