Importing Your Old Vault

If you've been using Obsidian and have notes you'd like to bring into the Celestial Vault, the import button does most of the work for you.

What Gets Imported

When you run the importer, Celestial recursively copies the following from your old vault into your new Celestial Vault:

• All .md files (your notes)
• All attachments: images, PDFs, canvas files, audio recordings, videos, and any other file your notes embed or link, wherever they live
• Your folder structure, preserved exactly as it was
• The contents of the old vault's Templates/ folder (so your custom templates come along)

Everything lands inside /old vault/<name>/ at the root of your Celestial Vault. The original is untouched — this is a copy, not a move.

Three guarantees come with it (since v2.1.0):

• Nothing is ever overwritten. If an incoming file's name collides with one already in your vault, the copy arrives with a suffix (Some note (2).md) instead of replacing anything.
• Imported notes are never rewritten. The templating engine leaves imported content completely alone; what you wrote is exactly what arrives.
• You get an honest summary. When the import finishes, a report tells you how many files were imported, how many were skipped, and whether anything errored.

What Doesn't Get Imported

For safety and cleanliness, the importer does not copy:

• The .obsidian/ folder (plugin configurations, themes, snippets — these would conflict with Celestial's own setup)
• .git/, .DS_Store, and other system / version-control files
• Hidden folders starting with .
• Database files from plugins (e.g., data.json files)

This is intentional. Your old plugin settings stay in your old vault. Celestial uses its own.

How To Run The Import

Option 1 — During Welcome

The welcome flow includes an Import step. Click it. An OS folder picker opens. Select the root of your old vault. Confirm.

Option 2 — From Settings (Anytime Later)

You can import after welcome too:

1. Open Settings → Celestial Plugin
2. Scroll to the Migration section
3. Click Import an existing vault
4. Select the root folder of your old vault
5. Wait for the copy to finish

The importer prints progress as it goes. For a small vault (a few hundred notes), it takes a few seconds. For a large vault with lots of images, it can take a minute or two.

(The import lives on desktop only; it relies on the OS folder picker, which phones don't offer. Import on your computer, then sync to your phone.)

Coming From The Original Time Garden Vault?

You get special treatment. When the import finishes and the imported folder looks like a Time Garden vault, a dialog offers a one-click conversion: your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes move into the Celestial Time Garden tree and get converted so banners, day theming, navigation, and your charts keep working.

The full story is on Coming From Time Garden.

Where Your Imported Notes End Up

Celestial Vault/
├── Time Garden/
│   ├── 01 Daily/        ← Celestial's daily notes
│   ├── 03 Monthly/
│   ├── 04 Quarterly/    (Dreamlines)
│   └── 05 Yearly/
├── ... etc
└── old vault/
    └── My Old Vault/    ← your imported notes live here
        ├── Some note.md
        ├── Another note.md
        ├── Templates/
        └── ... etc

The folder name My Old Vault/ matches whatever your old vault's folder name was on disk.

Adapting Imported Notes To The Celestial Style

Your imported notes won't automatically use the Celestial categorical system. They keep their original frontmatter, tags, folder positions — exactly as they were.

If you want to gradually migrate them to Celestial's self-organizing approach, you have a few options:

1. Leave them where they are.

This is fine. The notes still work. They show up in search. They show up in the graph. They just don't auto-aggregate into Celestial's database views (because they don't have categories: frontmatter).

2. Move important ones to the root and add categories.

When you find an old note you reference often, move it from /old vault/.../ to the root, open its properties, and add a categories: list with relevant wikilinks. It now joins the Celestial flow.

3. Selectively bulk-update with a tags-to-categories migration.

If your old vault used tags for organization, you can convert them to wikilink categories. Obsidian's built-in find and replace (Cmd + Shift + F on Mac, Ctrl + Shift + F on Windows) handles this well. Find #tag-name → replace with *Tag Name* and add a categories: line at the top.

Deleting /old vault/ Once You're Done

Once you've ported (or decided not to port) your imported notes, the /old vault/ folder is just dead weight in your file explorer. Three options:

1. Delete it.

Right-click → Delete. Gone. (Make sure your original vault is still on disk somewhere else if you want to keep it as backup.)

2. Hide it from the file explorer.

Add old vault to Settings → Files & Links → Excluded files. The folder still exists on disk but won't show in Obsidian.

3. Keep it as a fossil layer.

Leave it. Notes inside still work, still appear in search, still show in the graph. The folder name "old vault" makes its purpose obvious to future-you.

Common Issues

"The importer says my old vault doesn't exist."

Make sure you pointed the picker at the root of the old vault — the folder that contains the .obsidian/ subfolder. Not a subfolder inside the old vault.

"Some images or attachments are missing after import."

The importer copies files by walking the old vault's folder tree. If you had files in unusual locations (e.g., a relative path outside the vault folder, or symlinked from elsewhere), they wouldn't be picked up. Look at any broken embed in the imported notes; the path will tell you where the original was. The import summary also tells you if any files were skipped or errored.

"I got a 'Template parsing error' during import."

Older versions of the importer ran imported notes through the templating engine, and complex vaults could trip it: an error mid-import, and in some cases silently modified content. v2.1.0 fixed this. Imported notes are now copied verbatim and never touched by templates.

If you're seeing this error, update first (Settings → Celestial Plugin → Updates → Check for updates), then re-run the import.

"My templates are imported but Templater can't find them."

Open Settings → Templater and update the Template folder location to point at old vault/<name>/Templates/ (or wherever your imported templates landed). Or copy the templates into Celestial's main Templates/ folder.

Up Next

• The Self-Organizing Vault — the philosophy you'll want to read before porting
• Wikilink Categories — how to add categories to imported notes
• The Empty-Tab Atmosphere — what awaits you after onboarding