1 vs 2 Obsidian Vaults - How Many Should You Have?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ค. 2024
- Subscribe to my monthly newsletter: fromsergio.substack.com
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:45 - Arguments For 1 Vault
03:18 - Arguments For 2+ Vaults
05:48 - Why I Use 3 Different Vaults
08:37 - Final Thoughts And Recommendations
🎵 Where I Get My Music - www.epidemicsound.com/referra...
🎥 My Camera Gear - kit.co/fromsergio
☕ Buy Me A Coffee - ko-fi.com/fromsergio
Some of the above are affiliate links which means I get a small commission at no extra cost to you, which helps support the channel. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter: fromsergio.substack.com
The open folder as a vault tip from within your already opened vault 1:47
🤯- Thank you for this!
We need an obsidian for students' videos on a real example. I still don't quite understand how it works. Maybe you could share how to build up a students project in an obsidian environment in the most efficient way
Yeah its on my list, I'm no longer a student and obsidian wasn't around back then, so my obsidian for students video will be the only video that isn't anecodotal, I will simply go over how I'd use it in a school enivironment. Hope it helps
@FromSergio I'd love that as I am heading to programming school without teachers(01 edu methodology), and I guess obsidian would be our holly grail for our collective workflow
Start messing around first
If you are into Programming too
take the syllabus of the class, make that the folder structure, then add a note per class day. As keywords start to pop out or repeat, break those down into it's own file so you can continue to link that keyword between multiple class days.
then make a directory for all your "projects".
Uhh hello. You haven’t made a student video yet lol come on man don’t leave us hanging.
Great video, Sergio! This is a question I've asked myself multiple times. Still thinking about it, but you gave very useful points on all sides of the question. But I had to chuckle when you said that many of us would have loved to have Obsidian when we were in school. I'm 70 years old, and when I was in graduate school, I was *thrilled* to have an electric typewriter LOL!
As a german native speaker im just amazed by how the german word "Zettelkasten" has found its way into the english language :D love it
I am starting my second brain, but I have one vault for work and another for my personal stuff. Justly because work has its own policies, and I don’t want to drag work related things. However some of my passion are present in both. So I’ve been considering a way to have my personal vault be editable from the work vault, but only sync the personal part with my home computer. This shared vault idea is worth investigating. I’d share with myself.
Absolutely! Thanks for sharing!
Your channel is genuinely a true germ. Hat off for idea of Shared Vault. I look forward to more videos in this series.
Great videos. I have been binge-watching these for the past few days, just to learn more. I switched from Notion to Obsidian in early 2022, I think, and it's been quite a mind-blowing experience.
I currently have three vaults: my Zettelkasten, my entrance exam prep (ICT engineering, so lots of math that I don't want in my multi-discipline Zettelkasten until I have a very good grasp of it and I can confidently make accurate connections), and one for spiritual things/paganism.
Thanks for the kind words, as a notion "refugee" myself I completely agree! About a year and a half into obsidian now and can't imagine life without it. Thanks for sharing!
So it all boils down to 3 questions: 1) Do the notes connect to each other? 2) Are you seeing poor Obsidian responsiveness. 3) Do you want to re-use the same set of plugins. And I think maybe it's good to have multiple vaults as a folder hierarchy. You can open the top-most folder/vault if you want to find more connections. And you can just open some lower-level folder/vault if you want to focus on specific notes. And you can have attachment folder within each vault folder. Obsidian's search algorithm seems to be able to find the attachments even from a higher-level folder/vault.
Great sum up!
I figured a massive appeal of obsidian was being able to link the thoughts across my personal, school studies, personal studies, and todo aspect of my life
It seems so bizzare to split it, at that point just use apps designed to do everything else lmao
I might split it if slowdowns start happening, but I have 1 vault for now. I am a fiction writer, and the unexpected best thing for me so far is having something like a personal wiki for the larger, more nebulous topics. I have a MOC for my current project, one for writing craft study, and one solely for snippets of ideas and concepts for future exploration. Splitting it up that way works for now. I have loose unrelated topics thrown into my vault, basically anything that interests me, but so far that is more feature than bug. Ideas can come from anywhere. Plus, any research I do on my current project could very well be helpful in a different project years down the line. I'm very enthusiastic about what I have managed to build so far.
"Plus, any research I do on my current project could very well be helpful in a different project years down the line." That's exactly the beauty of this system. It's a joy to pick up stuff from years ago and link it to a current project!
Thanks Sergio, that really clarified the issues for me, and saved me finding them out myself. Great series.
Perfect! Glad you're enjoying them :)
A shared vault is a great idea, although you'd _really_ have to trust the people you share it with because, as far as I know, Obsidian doesn't have a track changes or block-level versioning plugin. There is a new-ish service called PeerDraft for Obsidian that allows live collaboration on Obsidian notes peer-to-peer (no third-party server). It has a free tier worth exploring.
I'm a fiction writer, and I only just discovered Obsidian about a week ago, so I'm very much a beginner. So far I have each novel or series in its own vault. I know I could separate them in other ways within one vault, but I don't want the distraction of, for example, characters from other books getting mixed together. Maybe I'm too stuck in the past. I don't know. For now I'm loving the program for gathering all the bits and pieces together as I'm brainstorming a new story, but I like having each story world in its own discrete vault. I'll have to see how it goes over time.
Thanks for sharing! You're most definitely not stuck in the past, keep it going!
Hey, Just read your comment and as a writer myself with the Same vault questions, i would love to hear how you geht along with different vaults over time. I think im gonna Split my fiction Folder from The rest of my Main vault to an own vault, but Not sure If for every novel necessary.
@@om6418 I ended up having everything in one vault (on the computer I use primarily for writing). I put each novel in a separate folder. The main reason I'm keeping everything in the same vault is for linking purposes. I want to be able to link to general research for any novel. Sometimes I do research for which I don't yet have a specific novel started. I also use metadata so I can use Dataview queries to pull things together, such as all my plot notes for a story, or the notes about a specific character. Hope this helps!
Your videos even from two years ago keep on providing so much value, Sergio - thanks so much! I've wrestled with the 1 knowledgebase vs multiple for a long time now, in Notion before Obsidian, and Evernote before Notion. While I have been trying to stick to that "One Vault to Rule Them All" dream, I've more recently been drawn to keep my Work vault separate from my Life vault for two major reasons: (1) I'd like to think of my Life not always framed in the shadow of Work and (2) when in Work mode, I don't want to be distracted or lured away by something more fun and interesting that pops up from the Life notes.
Treating each folder as a vault is something I didn't think before. Btw thanks for explaining your own personal scenario, really helped. I used to aspire to combine all my vaults into one.
Yeah, very overlooked feature, glad you enjoyed it!
Sergio - Thanks for your tip on opening a folder as a vault. This really helped me a lot since I just wanted to see the graph view for one particular folder so I could better see the connections and nodes. If possible, perhaps you could add this feature to your timestamped sections.
Thanks for the input, I just looked into the video and the timestamps and it would not make logistical sense since then I'd have to do the same for the other arguments. Especially since the part about opening folder as a vault is on the first minute, but thanks for the suggestion I really appreciate it.
A balanced and thoughtful discussion. Thanks Sergio!
Just saw this! Thanks Chloe :)
Great series Sergio. Thanks for doing it. I struggled organizing and using Obsidian, until you made so many concepts clear to me.
Thanks Dennis, I'll be uploading a markdown video as EP11 :)
I now have 2 vaults, because the first was built as a folder structure and now the second I'm using to write my study notes.
Just when I thought I was getting my head round Obsidian, and now I wonder if I need 2 (or more vaults) 😂 I really need to look into Zettlekasten, I don't understand why it's so obvious it's not connected to anything.
Security-related reason for multiple vaults:
My work is paranoid, understandably, about their intellectual property getting leaked. There's no way they'd be okay with me having my work-related notes syncing to my private cloud-based storage.
For this reason, I'll be setting up a separate vault for work. But much of my course work that I do for advancing my skills is my own and want to go with me if/when I move on.
Timely video. I started splitting out my vaults this week because I'm piling too much text onto Obsidian, and it is starting to slow down. Thanks for the well written video with practical examples/use cases.
Glad you enjoyed it, have a great weekend!
For me, I have been having difficulty deciding on whether I want to use one or multiple vaults, simply due to my vastly varied interests and fields of study. I am studying multiple languages, programming and networking administration, making TH-cam videos, etc etc. I find it difficult to organize all of these different topics in the graph view without things getting hard to follow... But I also find it deeply impractical to have a separate vault for every topic, as I have a lot of specific plugins catered to my areas of study and having to re-add and re-set them up every time is just a hassle, especially because I use multiple devices and OSs.
I appreciate this series because it taught me about the power of using tags, which I think is probably what I am going to do moving forward - Use one vault, but have a separate tag for every topic in my vault. Then I can use templates to automatically apply those tags to note headers so that the vault kind of organizes itself. Appreciate this video and your series as a whole Sergio, excellent work as always.
Your plugins concern is not an issue, simply go into your .obsidian folder and copy and paste the plugin config files into the root folder of another vault and everything gets carried over!
Thanks for sharing your approach! It's interesting to see how some people would never have more than one while others have 5 or more!
And thanks for the kind words! A lot of work goes into these videos :)
i am working with 2 vaults 1 for gardening another for medical ultrasound I love using that graph of you to explore what I have in there, and in that we create new ideas and thoughts as to which way to direct my thinking and investigations. Therefore for me since vegetables and Ultrasound are two different things I cannot have them on the same part of my brain both of us are my brain, but the different parts of my brain and it was simpler and better like that allowing me to see the full view of the craft. I’m looking at without interruption from the other
I started using Obsidian yesterday. My vault's purpose is keeping notes for my studies and research.
However, I just discovered how useful this app/platform would be for many different areas of my life, and I'm planning to create at least 1-2 separate vaults. These other ones would be for:
- my work (which is in an area that is different from my studies and research); and
- my personal stuff, i.e. online presence and activity (social media accounts, various web browsing notes, etc.).
I don't think these areas of my life have much of an overlap, and I don't see how they would in the future, and if so, the overlap would be so minuscule as to not mandate cramming everything into one vault and dealing with the chaotic environment that would create.
I have several volts. One for my personal life, one dealing with higher philosophical issues, one defining healthcare, and one dealing with a large organization and how it is structured.
Similar. Add one for managing tabletop RPGs, subtract for healthcare because so far my healthcare is pretty simple to manage. As I get older, we'll see.
Thanks for your sharing. Very inspiring for new comer like me. Excellent. I follow you because of your style.💯
Thanks! Since you're a newcomer be sure to check out the rest of the series. And glad you like the style :)
Thanks Sergio! Very useful thoughts. Well done, concise persentation.
Thanks for the kind words!
Fantastic new ideas as always. I'm a programmer myself and I would love to see some new videos dedicated to specific workflows related to programming. Thanks.
On the list! :)
@@FromSergio Looking forward to this!
I run a longlasting D&D campaign in a world I created. The sheer amount of information and entries on all sorts of things requires a vault for that game alone. It's like my own Silmarilion with Lord of the Rings books included (i.e. worldbuilding + the story).
Then there is my "second brain" vault where my personal notes go, reading journals, student work, creative writing, words I learn, projects, etc. For now, I don't see a need to break down my second brain vault. It helps to have all those various interests of mine in the same vault in case of unexpected links in the future.
Great approach to the vaults, Sergio! I’ve decided to try using 2 vaults just recently. Currently I have the vault called “BrainOS” for my notes based on books, articles, research etc. The second one is called “MedicalOS” for the information I learn and work on in medical school.
Love that! BrainOS and MedicalOS! Sounds like a great use case, best of luck with your studies!
@@FromSergio Thanks!
oh i really like when you said "one brain one vault " you are a great master Sergio
:)
I have to have two vaults out of necessity. One is for my day job due to confidentiality is maintained within corp resources. My other vault is on my personal machine that I use in the context of my interests and my main TH-cam channel.
It’s a struggle.
Thanks for sharing! Many folks have 2 vaults for that reason
1 vault but still can’t help almost overorganizing it. Trying to be more Obsidian less Notion though. Great Video Sergio!!
Three so far: Personal/main, books, work/tech. Performance is the main reason.
Yup! Interesting that you have one solely for books! You must be an avid reader :)
Hi, I have 2 vaults and it has been a nightmare learning. I purchase Obsidian sync and then ended up combining vaults. Thanks for your videos.
Thanks for sharing! I know it can get overwhelming, hopefully might vides were able to alleviate some of that!
I have just started my Journey, and already have found that I need a second vault...mostly for tabletop roleplay. Game Mastering has me taking a lot of notes on how things interact with the world and such, and has no place at all in my primary vault, cause its effectively just a completely seperate splinter from the rest of the vault, with maybe 5 connections to the rest of the greater vault.
I have a main vault and a private vault for personal journals and writing. I keep the private one separate because I don't want personal emotional things connecting with research and work.
Yup! I do the same. I've come to appreciate it more now that I've had it like that for 2 years!
I have two but only because work has things with security classifications.
Another great video, but it would have been great if you could have explained what Zettelkasten was. I had no idea what you were talking about or even what you word were saying. I only found this thanks to other comments. Maybe you could add an annotation or at least some notes in the video description? You use this word a lot in this video, so it would really help.
You could also cover how to take effective notes for programming
If there's a demand for that i'll happily do one as that is a big part of my day
@@FromSergio Please do so, I'd love to see that 😂😂
Sergio...thanks so much for your good material....What about putting, for example, Readwise exports, into a separate vault such that you know for certain that stuff someone else wrote won't get into your work by mistake. Not sure how the state of cross vault integration would impede being able to build on that, or extract, selected information into your PKM system?
Thanks! I use readwise on my main vault and I give it a dedicated folder precisely so it doesn't interfere with my own stuff while being able to link it to my own thoughts. That's what works for me!
This answered some questions, thank you! Is it hard to merge for example your Zettelkasten notes from your one main vault to a second vault, if the main one becomes too big?
Depends on the complexity of your vault but usually a zettelkasten tends to be fairly isolated so it should be an easy task!
I'm currently using one big very well organized vault as my main workflow, and sometimes I open folders within it as their own vaults if I want to get a more detailed overview on a specific section. I make sure to forget them each time so it only saves the folders settings and I only make modifications in the high view vault.
I redesigned my main vault 3 different times, each importing more notes and collating old info down into single documents. I get a little bit grossed out when I see these videos of '20 billion notes imported' or whatever nonsense, because that volume is just purely unmanageable.
My means of organizing wouldn't work for everyone but it's a very powerful method that allows you to get the most from low level ideas.
There could be entire classes just showing off how you think using obsidian and comparing methods.
Oh yeah, I also keep my entire media collection as a vault, currently setting up indexes for it.
My main vault was designed with three large clusters of ideas that eventually became linked. The best way I can describe it is by showing it.
Each of those three clusters are meant to be opened as their own folder vault if ever needed to get a better overview of each cluster.
Very advanced, thanks for sharing! As long as it works for you! :)
Thank you Sergio ! I wonder what are the topics of your zettelkasten vault.
I mean, is clear what you have in your 'main' and 'programming' vaults, but what is your zettelkasten for ?
Hi Mario, thanks for taking an interest. My zettelkasten is for everything that I come across that inspires me to either write about or store for later reference. For i.e., I write a lot about what I find online. A big part of ym ZK is curating and writing my own content based on the sea of high quality stuff I subscribe to via RSS(yup some of us still use it!). There's about 30 high quality "thought leaders" I enjoy following that bring me a good deal of inspiration. So, in short, my ZK has everything from philosophical takes, to anectodal experiences and everything in between. Hope this helps!
I have been using my coding stuff on Notion. I am very cruious to see how you are using Obsidian for your coding notes, and how it benefits > than Notion. If its okey to share that is... Thanks for all your videos.
They serve different purposes in my workflow, I still use notion but all of my programming, zettelkasten and journaling needs have been filled by Obsidian. I have a video on the subject that I'll be uploading soon. :)
3 vaults: my job, tech education, everything else.
Out of curiosity, what does your programming vault look like? How do you use it? Thanks.
Do you plan to explain your zettelkasten process in Obsidian, since you mentioned you have a separate vault for that? I would love to see that.
Hi Mark, currently working on a couple of dataview focused videos but yes I do have zettelkasten in the pipeline!
Yeah, I'd be curious why zettelkasten would be in its own folder. Like wouldn't I want notes to say a book in my main vault?
Hello Sergio, what exactly makes the vaults go slower? Too much media added or too many links between long notes? I just downloaded it and I'm watching your series to see if Obsidian is the offline notebook-like software I could use for my art research, journal, project manager, book review/anotations... But the performance issues are concerning to me since I saw the app searchs quite fast and smooth and that was appealing, hehe.
Hi Jose, media would be the main culprit here for most systems. Generally speaking you need to have a large amount of media in your vault for it to be noticeable, it would also depend on the system itself. If you're running it on an old and limited machine it's normal that if you have a vault in the 50gb+ ballpark it's gonna struggle!
I have two different vaults that get used a lot but they are so vastly different that before I even completely understood the concept of vaults, I knew that I'd have one knowledge based vault and another that's mainly a collection. The collection is my Cooking or Recipes vault. I've been collecting recipes online for years and adding my own in as well. That side of things uses a lot of space and resources so I had separated it out in my previous note taking app (Nimbus, which has 'workspaces') and continued it with Obsidian. I have one vault that's strictly for trying out and testing new plugins if I'm not sure about them. I also use it for import trials such as an app that converts Evernote .enex files to mark down. Just to be sure the resulting files would be ok and could be moved over to my main Obsidian vault. So far my luck with it hasn't been great. Plus there are downloaded example vaults that I access every now and then to see how certain things were set up. It's easy to change to another vault so ... I really don't see a problem with having several for various reasons. If my partner were still alive, I'm absolutely sure we'd have a shared vault for household related information and research about home automation products and apps.
This was a great topic and as usual you've done a great job of explaining use cases and relevant work arounds. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for sharing Gaelyne and I'm sorry to hear about your partner :( Thanks for the kind words and I'm glad you enjoyed the content!
Hi Gaelyne, I'm sorry to hear about your partner! But wow, such a brilliant idea to use shared vault for houseworks. By the way, I'd love to give respect to your good leaning attitude. Hope I can do the same when I'm in your age.
@@PandalPan Thank you! Learning keeps the brain active and just like exercise for the body those synapses aren't going to do much if you don't also challenge your mind. I admit my brain is doing a much better job of things than the physical these days but I try to keep both busy. Take care!
is it possible to hide specific folders from your graph view? 🤔 I use my vault mainly for Zettelkasten, but I´d like to hide non related folders from the graph view ...
Simply add "-/(folder name)". I cover this and more on my graph view video titled - How I use the obsidian graph view
@@FromSergio thank you, you are the best! :)
IF i want only distraction free environment, then i can just open a folder as vault right? if i open a folder as a vault, i can also habe another theme in there and other plugins than in the origin vault? I still dont really get the difference of a new vault or a folder as a vault:) I noticed when i make changes in the new vault which i created out of a folder the changes apply also to the folder in the first origin vault and vice versa, right? Lastly: What is the workbench plugin?
Is there any risk in creating nested vaults? Did anything break when you did that?
Hi Diego, not at all, many people use nested vaults!
awesome series so far! it really made Obsidian click for me. i’m curious if you’ve ever used a vault as a shared team folder. in my case we need to use Dropbox to share files, so we can’t use the native Obsidian sync feature. the Dropbox sync is pretty fast, but not quite real-time. there’s a second or two delay to see changes. i’m trying to figure out if it would make sense for the team to collaborate within notes or if we should all be creating our own separate notes that link together. any tips on Obsidian for teams?
Hi Andrew, yeah I share a vault with my partner, I managed to covert her! Since we keep everything local in our NAS the changes go live in a split second. Is the 1 second or two delay significant for your team's workflow? I don't see a way around having at least some split seconds of delay!
@@FromSergio the delay isn't terrible, but it's definitely a bit more laggy than Google Docs or something like that. i've also heard reports of some strange behavior from another team member but i haven't been able to reproduce that. i think we'll try to collaborate on meeting notes in real time for now and see how it goes. thanks!
@@AndrewMowe 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
i have 1 vault and 3 template vaults that i just got
I feel like creating 3 vaults. I already have one mainly for my anime, manga, movies and whatnot. Thinking of 2 more, 1 for my art/shop and another for my board review. I don't want them all in one big vault (like in my Apple Notes). Just like online, I use different usernames or have different personas. I wanted to use Notion before for organizing but I didn't really get into doing it and just stick with Apple Notes. I like Notion for its database feature which I use for manga and other media (I actually embedded some of my databases from Notion in Obsidian using so I wouldn't have to recreate everything with Dataview). I feel like I'll be motivated to review for my boards with Obsidian so I might do a separate vault just for that. I wish Obsidian was around when I was still in school.
I feel you on the last one. Evernote came out when I was in college and it's hard to think of the opportunity cost of not having obsidian
Obsidian needs to add a choice for writing from right to left just for one single note, not for the entire vault since when I swith RTL it affects all notes, is there a way you know about it ?
Not that I'm aware of it, maybe try the obsidiam forums and if not you can always do a feature request.
Would you recommend sub-vaults as a hybrid solution?
Sure if it makes sense for your use case!
@@FromSergio ta for that. It does in my case as I have four main areas of study, so would like to keep the separate but not isolated!
I am new to this whole thing, but I plan on using 3 vaults for 3 languages I use as a student
It feels counterintuitive to link the pages in different languages to each other
Maybe forcing yourself to quickly switch languages will strengthen your mental acuity and increase your overall proficiency in each language.
I can see how it would get tiresome though
@@suburbanyute340 it's also the fact that I need different languages for different reasons. My native language is for science and planning; English is for self-improvement and self-fulfillment, German is for studying German.
Interesting, I suppose it makes sense since you are actually studying some of these languages. And you mentioned in a comment below that you use English and your native language for different purposes, very interesting to see that. I'm sure it'll work out :)
you could define aliases in different languages. that way, you can link to pages that are in a different language without having to use that different language. :)
For me, it’s hard for me to install, setting and set hotkeys again and again 😢
You can just copy and paste them to another vault. To do this go to the obsidian folder of vault A, if you're on a mac press CMD Shift period(.) and go into ".obsidian" you'll find every setting of your vault there, plugins, hotkeys, themes etc. Simply copy and paste what you want into vault B :)
It pains me why Obsidian doesn't have Web Clipper similar to Evernote, most of resources I grab that way?! Or at least some decent bookmarking system? Thx. Any opinions? Great vid and whole course btw ;)
I use readwise for that, specifically readwise reader which just came out and it's in public beta.
@@FromSergio yes, funny thing I've discovered their Reader just after I've wrote this comment 🙃😃. Thanks, anyways ;)
Aren't sub-vaults unsupported?
"You can't link in between vaults - only manually." That's not true, you can work around it by creating hyperlinks with obsidian urls: "copy obsidian url" --> copied to clipboard --> make a hyperlink in one vault with the url of the other. It works just fine!
OBSIDIAN VAULT racine ( vault 1 + vault 2 + vault 3 ......)
What is this your second vault about? I cannot make it from your video, sorry.
1 for Zettelkasten, one for programming, and one for everything else(mainly journaling, youtube channel, habit tracking, etc.)
@@FromSergio zettelkasten! Thanks! I did not know such framework exists and it did not occured to me you would use German word :D
Hold up. How can you say 1 brain, one vault while at the same time calling your vault a "Second Brain". Shouldn't it be 2 brains, one vault? :)
Maybe it's just me, but your jump cuts are kinda jarring. Too much space at the start of each cut. Why not just start each cut right when you start talking? Cool content though, keep it up!
Thanks for the feedback, that's the first I've heard but I'm on a constant mission to improve my editing so I'll take any and all feeedback! Could you give me some timestamp examples of sections that you thought were particularly jarring? When editing I even thought i put too little space at thes tart of each cut!
@@FromSergio One thing I read on cuts recently to make them less jarring was to have the first section zoomed in and then the next one zoomed out, so it has a bit of flow to it.
these "vaults" make no sense... I have 10 Notes in one and its alrteayd messy as hell.. you add pictures then it creates a whole new note separate... this app is crap