Video Transcript

All right, so here I am in the Obsidian Field Guide Vault, and you'll get a link to this. It's a public vault you can look through as you're working through the field guide. But in this video, which we're in, Obsidian Setup Vault Creation, which is section 4.3, we want to create some vaults together.

The way you do that is you go down to the bottom left corner here, and you see this little thing looks kind of like a vault door. It's got little hinges on the left. and when you hover over it, it clicks open. That's the Obsidian vault. So I'm gonna go ahead and click that. And you can see right now, I've got a couple of them. I've got Sparky OS, that's my personal vault. And then I've got the Obsidian Field Guide vault, which I'm showing you right now. But we wanna create a new vault.

There's several options here. The first one is just to create a vault from scratch. That's ultimately what we're going to do here. You want to have an empty vault as you work through the field guide, and it's gonna help you figure out how this app works and hopefully over time, this will turn into your personal vault.

You can also open an existing folder as a vault. Now, the thing I've said repeatedly about Obsidian that makes it great is that at the end of the day, it's just a folder full of markdown files. Well, if you already have a folder full of markdown files, maybe you've been using some other markdown writing app and you wanna just turn that into a vault, you can do that. You just go to the folder with the markdown files, You click open right here, you select it, and that creates a vault for you.

You can also open a vault from Obsidian Sync. And we're going to get into that in a little bit, that when we talk about syncing, but I'm a fan of the Obsidian Sync service, you can create a vault in there and then access it through this menu. But what we'll start with is just creating a new basic vault.

So we'll go ahead and click create. That's going to be a local vault. We're going to give it a name and I'm going to call this a sample vault. but I would encourage you to do something other than sample. Give it a personal name. Like I have one called Sparky OS. I think of that as my personal operating system. Maybe something like that, but you're gonna learn about the applications. You go through this vault, but I'm hoping you start adding your own data as you do. So give it a better name than that, but we're gonna call it sample for the field guide.

Then you pick a location for that. And what I would recommend you do with that is pick a location that is local to your computer. Now, you could put this in Dropbox or iCloud. And when I get to the syncing section, I'll explain how that works. But to begin with, you really wanna just start on your local folder. So if you look at my folder called Sparky, you can see I've got a subfolder called Obsidian. And in that, I've got the Obsidian field guide and I've got Sparky OS. I've got an old vault that I used when I ran my law practice that I've kept around.

So I'm going to create a new vault inside this same folder. So now if I go into the Finder, you'll see there it is, the sample vault, which is currently empty, but we're gonna take care of that. In fact, let's go in real quick and add a document. And this is gonna be the next video, but just to kind of finish the thought here, we'll call this the Sample Vault First Document.

Now we've added a document to the vault, and if I go back to the Finder, you'll see in the sample vault, there it is, sample vault first document. So let's get started filling the sample vault with data and learning how Obsidian works.