Filing, filing, everywhere ...
I’ve been busy these past few days with two small personal document-related projects running in parallel. I guess these can be categorised as overdue housekeeping, and finding and sorting documents that are scattered here, there, and everywhere.
The first project meant getting serious with utilising Obsidian as my note-taking / documentation app. Up until now I’ve used Apple Notes, Bear, and iA Writer as repositories of words. Ephemeral notes went to the Notes app, research material went to the Bear app, and long-form writing (e.g. reports and articles written using the aforementioned research notes).
While I was at it I subscribed to Obsidian Sync to synchronise all my notes across my various devices (At first I used Apple's iCloud but, whereas that system works very well for everything else, it failed to reliably sync Obsidian files.)
Bear is an excellent app but I have in the past, and now again, preferred to have my notes in discrete, text-based, Markdown files. I moved all my notes from Bear to Obsidian (while at the same time deleting those that are no longer relevant).
Markdown has no defined specification for storing image files and this can be problematic. For example Bear notes have screenshots copied and pasted from maps, drawings and old newspaper content - internally, Bear gave these images the identical name “image.png”. When multiple files with the same name are stored in a directory, as for Obsidian, it becomes a tad difficult to manage those files - ie if I delete a note, which image files do I then have to find and delete separately.
I bit the bullet and manually identified and renamed each image file as I transferred individual notes to Obsidian (where I elected use a sub-directory to store all note attachments). I gave the image files the same name as the note and added a numerical suffix if there was more than one image file per note.
I now have around 400 notes on Obsidian with a yet-to-be-determined number of notes still to be added (these notes existed as Markdown files in the file system, and some notes exist in iA Writer and should also be moved to Obsidian).
Which brings me to my second project: Collecting files from various locations on each of my laptop and desktop systems.
I'm very good at storing interesting and essential reference material, but, apparently, not so good at filing these notes in a methodical manner. I'm about 90% of the way through collecting files from laptop and desktop and depositing them in one "dump". Once I've completed that task the harder job of correctly filing the "dumped" files begins (utilising Obsidian's links and backlinks, and multiple tags per file where appropriate).