Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Vaults.

So, what exactly is a vault? Put simply, a vault is a folder on your disk. When you point Obsidian at that folder, it reads every markdown file inside it and builds a knowledge graph from the links between those files. That’s really the core idea — a vault is just a folder, and Obsidian does the rest.

Let’s talk about what you’ll find inside a typical vault. If you were to open one up in your file explorer, you’d see a top-level folder — let’s call it MyVault. Inside that, there’s a hidden folder called dot-obsidian, and that’s where Obsidian stores all its settings for that vault: things like your plugins, your themes, and your keyboard shortcuts. Everything else in the vault is your actual content — plain markdown files and any attachments you’ve added. So you might have a Notes folder, a Projects folder, a Templates folder — whatever structure works for you. Your content and your Obsidian settings live side by side, but they’re cleanly separated.

Now, one thing that trips people up at first is the idea of multiple vaults. Obsidian fully supports having more than one vault, and each one is completely independent. That means each vault has its own set of settings — its own plugins, its own theme, its own keyboard shortcuts. Each vault also has its own graph, which is important: links between notes only resolve within the same vault. If you’ve got a note in one vault that you try to link to from another vault, Obsidian won’t connect them. Each vault also maintains its own recent files list, its own search index, and its own plugin state. So if you’ve got a plugin configured a certain way in one vault, that configuration doesn’t carry across to another. To switch between vaults, you can go to File, then Open Another Vault, or use the vault switcher shortcut.

Speaking of opening vaults, there are three main ways to do it. First, you can open an existing folder — just go to File, Open Vault, then choose Open Folder as Vault, and point it at any folder on your machine. Second, you can create a brand new vault from scratch using the Create New Vault option in that same menu. And third, the vault switcher shows you all the vaults you’ve previously opened, so you can jump back to any of them quickly.

Now let’s dig into that dot-obsidian folder a bit more, because it’s worth understanding what lives in there. There are several key files and subfolders to know about. First is a file called app dot json — that holds your core settings, like editor preferences, appearance options, and how Obsidian handles files and links. Then there’s a plugins subfolder, which is where your installed community plugins live. There’s a themes subfolder for your installed themes. There’s a file called hotkeys dot json, which stores any custom keyboard shortcuts you’ve set up. If you’re using the Templates core plugin, you’ll also see a templates subfolder in there. And finally there’s workspace dot json, which saves your current layout — which panes are open, which tabs you have active, and the state of your sidebars.

Here’s a practical tip around syncing. If you sync your vault across devices — say between your desktop and your laptop — you’ll want to include the dot-obsidian folder in your sync setup. That way your settings, plugins, and themes follow you to every device. However, there’s one exception worth knowing: workspace dot json. If you don’t want your pane layout to sync — maybe you prefer a different arrangement on each machine — you can exclude that file from your sync. Small detail, but handy to know.

Finally, let’s talk about performance. The good news is that Obsidian handles large vaults very well — we’re talking tens of thousands of notes without breaking a sweat. But there are a few things that can slow it down. Very large individual files, anything over about one megabyte, can cause performance issues. Having too many community plugins installed is another common culprit. And if you’re using Dataview — a popular plugin for querying your notes like a database — running heavy queries across a massive vault without caching enabled can put a real strain on things. So if you notice Obsidian getting sluggish, those are the three areas to look at first: individual file size, plugin count, and how efficiently your Dataview queries are running.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.