Comment by pdpi
11 hours ago
One specific bit of advice in there that I disagree with is keeping just one vault. Rather, I find that having one vault per topic/project is the right approach.
The reason for having multiple vaults is simple: I find that the usability of the one big über-vault drops off sharply if you're not disciplined in maintaining organisation, and a consistent workflow, and, if you're storing a bunch of disparate things in a single vault, an organisation/workflow that's universal enough to encompass everything rapidly becomes a pain in the arse to maintain. Inversely, topic-specific vaults tend to rapidly develop their own bespoke structures and workflows that match the topic closely and are very natural to work in.
For example, I have a large vault dedicated to Blue Prince (the game). As in several hundred megs worth of screenshots, over a hundred individual .md files (most of which are almost empty, but their existence is helpful in itself), folder structure that groups information on a per-puzzle basis, and it features pervasive use of tags to encode game features)
Another vault is a cookbook. I don't cook by recipe all that often, so that one mostly has reference tables for cooking times/temps for different foods in different appliances (I don't cook pearl barley often enough to remember how much liquid to use and what rice cooker programme to set).
I keep one vault for almost everything because the cross-domain links are where the interesting stuff happens. I studied sociology, political science, and media & communication before moving into IT, and I'm still actively interested in all of it and especially how these topics intersect. Where does a note on Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality go? The social science vault? The IT vault? Both? With a single vault I don't have to answer that question - the note exists, and I can use it to make connections to AI, social media, or cultural trends.
Multiple vaults break this. You end up duplicating notes, or linking across vault boundaries (which adds friction), or just forgetting where you put something. That's trading one of Obsidian's strongest features for... tidier folders.
The one case where I do split things out is genuinely isolated project knowledge - like a D&D campaign I used to GM. 99% of those notes have zero connection to anything else. Separation makes sense there precisely because there's nothing to link.
One more thing: a lot of people solve the "big vault gets messy" problem with elaborate folder structures, but Obsidian's search (especially with Omnisearch) makes most of that unnecessary. I don't really organize my notes into careful hierarchies. I write them, link them, and search for them. The mess is fine. I am one with the mess.
I just don't see myself needing to cross link my DnD, work, food, and home-lab nots significantly enough to not use separate collections.