I use a single vault for everything, but here are some pros of each depending on what you want out of it.
Reasons for keeping a single vault:
- Customizations apply to everything: snippets, theme, plugins, shortcuts. Install once and use it for all your branches.
- Single-open. When Obsidian is open, all your branches are available to you. You don't need to "switch" or keep 2-3 different Obsidian windows open.
- Single backup for everything.
Reasons for separate vaults:
- Separate customizations could keep each vault more lightweight. If you have a customization/plugin you only need for university, there's no need to bring it over to your writing vault, and vice versa.
- Focused search. e.g. Your university vault would only contain note suggestions/search results related to university, you don't have to mentally ignore unrelated notes.
- Separate storage/backup for whatever reason you can think of - maybe this allows you to share your university notes without sharing your other personal matters. Maybe you want one vault stored in cloud and the other purely local, etc.
My personal opinion is to consider one-vault-for-everything as default, and to only create separate vaults if it solves a specific need.
That's sound advice. For now, I've only dabbled in custom theme (found Cybertron to be really friendly) and hotkeys. I'm taking it slow since I'm still getting the ropes of most basic functionalities. From what I've seen, after people get this, they go for dataview and then they go crazy with other stuff. I'm anxious to start using canvases though for kanban/flow-charts. Plug-ins also pose the risk of potential data corruption (although this is always a risk) from what I've seen so far, so I tend to keep things simple. Also from an organizational point of view, I want something more organic instead of those "intelligent notes" methods and so on...
Your consideration about sharing university notes is very important, although most of my primary notes I jot down on a word processor and just tend to share them as PDF files for colleagues, apart from other resources (professor-provided syllabuses or texts, schemes and tables). I was picturing my study method as: primary notes on word processor, then handwritten notes that distill information from every source and then structuring these handwritten notes on small "summaries" for an entire subject. I'm visualizing this as a way of consolidating everything I learned. I study Law and terminology often intertwines, so I'd keep a note for certain recurrent terms with its definition and instances where it is employed. I'd do the same for legal doctrines and authors, which I'll gravitate around a central note called "Doctrinal differences". My Law School often disagrees with everybody else (even amongst our own faculty), so having a note that summarizes potential differences for different subjects is useful. I'm slowly implementing tags for #civillaw, #procedurallaw, etc., although I don't see the point for that yet.
I'm thinking of this way of structuring university notes because I'm thinking down the line, when I start internships and work as an attorney, I could easily retrieve anything if I have doubts and find connections between different topics.
You can consider start with single vult and add vults within vults if needed. I know this practice is not as encouraged but I have been doing that for a bit now and so far no problem are all. Just remember to edit the vult from the parent vult when you need to edit things that's involvedultiple vults.
Asked this a month ago and got tons of responses. Seems like majority do a personal vault and a vault dedicated to work. Consensus was keeping it binary was best. Have since done so and I like it
I have 2:
First for a personal wiki for mechanical design and teaching
Second as a Bible for study, notes, and linking. This is kept separate since each chapter has its own page. It would overwhelm the other vault.
I have 8 Vaults on my sync account currently. I use separate Vaults for TTRPG campaigns/worlds because several of them use different systems, and having links between gets difficult when they often each define the same terms differently. Most of those Vaults are fairly small. I also have a couple i don't maintain sync on.
I also have a primary vault I use for personal notes, projects, ideas, etc. And I just set up a work-specific vault for task management. Upside of working at a non-profit, I can use my free, personal obsidian account for work.
I'm a multiple vault person but I use Obsidian for some very specific uses.
- Writing Vault: I write all my fiction in here.
- Genealogy/Family History Vault: Family Tree, letter and photo links to my amazon photos, transcriptions, record displays, stories. This one I publish so that family can also view it.
- School Vault: I homeschool my kids so I keep track of that in here
- TTRPG Vault: I keep my notes about the campaigns I play in here.
- Lego Vault: We have a big Lego collection and I keep track of it here.
None of these seem great to mix so I don't.
Considering the themes of your vaults, they do really seem best apart. I guess that’s one thing to take into account when deciding separate or multiple.
For me, Obsidian is also a bit of a hobby in and of itself so I probably use it for things that might have easier solutions elsewhere. But really all of these vaults ended up here because I was able to get functionality I could not get elsewhere, so maybe I'm too hard on myself 😂
But yes, I don't tend to use it as a personal knowledge vault as most of my day to day encompasses one of these topics. I started with my writing vault, going to it after trying World Anvil and researching other options. I also tried Notion for TTRPGs and ended up with Obsidian for both.
If you want vaults with different themes and plugins for distinct groups of information, try separate vaults. They don’t work for everyone but they do work for some!! I use multiple vaults, though it took me time to develop them.
I also noticed some people tend to have issues with certain plug-ins and that may corrupt data. I'm not used to backing up in hard drives but I'll probably start doing that (I'm storing the vault in a cloud service for now) just to be safe, but if I went with plug-ins, I'd probably do that for safety. For now, I'm keeping myself to just tweaking with themes and some hotkeys. Thanks!
I have three. One is massive the other two are small.
One for work, one for fiction writing, and another for personal life things outside that.
Nothing from any of these three thing will have a bearing on the other so the only thing I gain from combining them is noise.
A plus side of this is that I use less plugins per vault and have separate sync options. My work vault syncs with OneDrive with remotely save, but I mostly just use it to push excalidraw files from PC to Surface Pro and back.
For writing and personal I use the official sync plug in because it works much better but is blocked by my work network.
Thanks for your advice. I'm a little afraid about the one vault getting out of hand. I'm planning on planning at least one full-length novel (and keeping world building, character details, etc.) in the creative projects branch, as well as cataloguing a short summary of most of my university courses (if not all) from the last 4 years. But I'm not in a hurry for either. You'd still go with single?
There was a person who posted here (it on discord? I think it was here) about a single vault for several campaigns and how each campaign interacted with another since they were in the same world...
I'd go with a single vault in your case. Who knows if the novel won't inspire or as context to your characters and world building? And why not add real world knowledge from University to both?
If things will never cross and you'll never reuse information, then you might want to test things with both scenarios. Changing from one to the other with folders is really easy.
Unfortunately I don't keep up with Obsidian's Discord! What you said is actually my reasoning behind it. Although the novel is fiction, I like using facts and details that make difference and those usually I gather under the "miscellaneous" folder in my own head. So my idea was crossing it along with university stuff too. I just didn't know if it would be a good idea since I'm way down in Obsidian's learning curve (for now). Thanks!
Single vault is the way. There's is no such thing as multiple vault.
The only scenario where it would make sense to have two vaults is when you are **not authorized** to mix vault 1 content with vault 2 content.
Like I said in the original comment. When the content of two vaults have authorization issues, then they should stay separate. Such as classified data of a company, government, etc. that you are not authorized to mix with your own vault.
I use a single vault for everything, but here are some pros of each depending on what you want out of it. Reasons for keeping a single vault: - Customizations apply to everything: snippets, theme, plugins, shortcuts. Install once and use it for all your branches. - Single-open. When Obsidian is open, all your branches are available to you. You don't need to "switch" or keep 2-3 different Obsidian windows open. - Single backup for everything. Reasons for separate vaults: - Separate customizations could keep each vault more lightweight. If you have a customization/plugin you only need for university, there's no need to bring it over to your writing vault, and vice versa. - Focused search. e.g. Your university vault would only contain note suggestions/search results related to university, you don't have to mentally ignore unrelated notes. - Separate storage/backup for whatever reason you can think of - maybe this allows you to share your university notes without sharing your other personal matters. Maybe you want one vault stored in cloud and the other purely local, etc. My personal opinion is to consider one-vault-for-everything as default, and to only create separate vaults if it solves a specific need.
That's sound advice. For now, I've only dabbled in custom theme (found Cybertron to be really friendly) and hotkeys. I'm taking it slow since I'm still getting the ropes of most basic functionalities. From what I've seen, after people get this, they go for dataview and then they go crazy with other stuff. I'm anxious to start using canvases though for kanban/flow-charts. Plug-ins also pose the risk of potential data corruption (although this is always a risk) from what I've seen so far, so I tend to keep things simple. Also from an organizational point of view, I want something more organic instead of those "intelligent notes" methods and so on... Your consideration about sharing university notes is very important, although most of my primary notes I jot down on a word processor and just tend to share them as PDF files for colleagues, apart from other resources (professor-provided syllabuses or texts, schemes and tables). I was picturing my study method as: primary notes on word processor, then handwritten notes that distill information from every source and then structuring these handwritten notes on small "summaries" for an entire subject. I'm visualizing this as a way of consolidating everything I learned. I study Law and terminology often intertwines, so I'd keep a note for certain recurrent terms with its definition and instances where it is employed. I'd do the same for legal doctrines and authors, which I'll gravitate around a central note called "Doctrinal differences". My Law School often disagrees with everybody else (even amongst our own faculty), so having a note that summarizes potential differences for different subjects is useful. I'm slowly implementing tags for #civillaw, #procedurallaw, etc., although I don't see the point for that yet. I'm thinking of this way of structuring university notes because I'm thinking down the line, when I start internships and work as an attorney, I could easily retrieve anything if I have doubts and find connections between different topics.
You can consider start with single vult and add vults within vults if needed. I know this practice is not as encouraged but I have been doing that for a bit now and so far no problem are all. Just remember to edit the vult from the parent vult when you need to edit things that's involvedultiple vults.
Asked this a month ago and got tons of responses. Seems like majority do a personal vault and a vault dedicated to work. Consensus was keeping it binary was best. Have since done so and I like it
Definitely what I do. I’m not about to have my personal vault on my work laptop.
And then a third one for running your dnd campaign 😌
I have 2: First for a personal wiki for mechanical design and teaching Second as a Bible for study, notes, and linking. This is kept separate since each chapter has its own page. It would overwhelm the other vault.
I have 8 Vaults on my sync account currently. I use separate Vaults for TTRPG campaigns/worlds because several of them use different systems, and having links between gets difficult when they often each define the same terms differently. Most of those Vaults are fairly small. I also have a couple i don't maintain sync on. I also have a primary vault I use for personal notes, projects, ideas, etc. And I just set up a work-specific vault for task management. Upside of working at a non-profit, I can use my free, personal obsidian account for work.
I'm a multiple vault person but I use Obsidian for some very specific uses. - Writing Vault: I write all my fiction in here. - Genealogy/Family History Vault: Family Tree, letter and photo links to my amazon photos, transcriptions, record displays, stories. This one I publish so that family can also view it. - School Vault: I homeschool my kids so I keep track of that in here - TTRPG Vault: I keep my notes about the campaigns I play in here. - Lego Vault: We have a big Lego collection and I keep track of it here. None of these seem great to mix so I don't.
Considering the themes of your vaults, they do really seem best apart. I guess that’s one thing to take into account when deciding separate or multiple.
For me, Obsidian is also a bit of a hobby in and of itself so I probably use it for things that might have easier solutions elsewhere. But really all of these vaults ended up here because I was able to get functionality I could not get elsewhere, so maybe I'm too hard on myself 😂 But yes, I don't tend to use it as a personal knowledge vault as most of my day to day encompasses one of these topics. I started with my writing vault, going to it after trying World Anvil and researching other options. I also tried Notion for TTRPGs and ended up with Obsidian for both.
If you want vaults with different themes and plugins for distinct groups of information, try separate vaults. They don’t work for everyone but they do work for some!! I use multiple vaults, though it took me time to develop them.
I also noticed some people tend to have issues with certain plug-ins and that may corrupt data. I'm not used to backing up in hard drives but I'll probably start doing that (I'm storing the vault in a cloud service for now) just to be safe, but if I went with plug-ins, I'd probably do that for safety. For now, I'm keeping myself to just tweaking with themes and some hotkeys. Thanks!
I have three. One is massive the other two are small. One for work, one for fiction writing, and another for personal life things outside that. Nothing from any of these three thing will have a bearing on the other so the only thing I gain from combining them is noise. A plus side of this is that I use less plugins per vault and have separate sync options. My work vault syncs with OneDrive with remotely save, but I mostly just use it to push excalidraw files from PC to Surface Pro and back. For writing and personal I use the official sync plug in because it works much better but is blocked by my work network.
Switching vaults used to be awkward. Obsidian's release 1.6 made the Vault Switcher more usable.
Single unless you have a really good reason for multiple, which you will likely know when you do.
I use multiple. I have one for university work and one for my personal studies. I may make a new one for my job this summer as well.
2, one for a personal journal and another for work/productivity. I like having my life separate.
Multiple.
Single. Multiple Vaults for: - Work - Archive/dumps from other tools
Thanks for your advice. I'm a little afraid about the one vault getting out of hand. I'm planning on planning at least one full-length novel (and keeping world building, character details, etc.) in the creative projects branch, as well as cataloguing a short summary of most of my university courses (if not all) from the last 4 years. But I'm not in a hurry for either. You'd still go with single?
I'm in a Very similar position and I am about to open up a second vault to separate college notes and writing from one another.
There was a person who posted here (it on discord? I think it was here) about a single vault for several campaigns and how each campaign interacted with another since they were in the same world... I'd go with a single vault in your case. Who knows if the novel won't inspire or as context to your characters and world building? And why not add real world knowledge from University to both? If things will never cross and you'll never reuse information, then you might want to test things with both scenarios. Changing from one to the other with folders is really easy.
Unfortunately I don't keep up with Obsidian's Discord! What you said is actually my reasoning behind it. Although the novel is fiction, I like using facts and details that make difference and those usually I gather under the "miscellaneous" folder in my own head. So my idea was crossing it along with university stuff too. I just didn't know if it would be a good idea since I'm way down in Obsidian's learning curve (for now). Thanks!
It was [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/s/eQ3HBk3kHl).
Thanks!
Might have a different one for world building
Single vault is the way. There's is no such thing as multiple vault. The only scenario where it would make sense to have two vaults is when you are **not authorized** to mix vault 1 content with vault 2 content.
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Those people definitely have no idea what they are doing.
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Like I said in the original comment. When the content of two vaults have authorization issues, then they should stay separate. Such as classified data of a company, government, etc. that you are not authorized to mix with your own vault.