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Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#11

Post by dnissley »

RedCardRef wrote: post #7
dnissley wrote: post #5

I use google drive and google photos. Photos go in photos, everything else goes in drive. Within google drive I follow a getting-things-done-ish approach. I have two folders at the root -- one for general filing, one for current projects. I use a combination of google keep + taking pictures of things to capture things quickly that need later attention. This isn't perfect. I don't like having to use google docs for al…

Ummm.. hate to play the devil's advocate here, I am sure you must have 2FA setup and all, but in the off chance that you loose access to your google account(for the sake of argument lets say for an "alleged" violation of ToS). How do you plan to regain access?

I do think sometimes about moving to a google for business account, but the likelihood of losing access to a google account seems pretty low, all things considered. It's easy to forget that here on hacker news, certain probabilities, dangers, etc. are overstated by extremely tiny groups of outspoken people. E.g. based on the comments here you might imagine that most people are somewhat wary of big tech because of privacy concerns, when that's probably not even true of people browsing hacker news in general, let alone the general populace of the US or the world.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#12

Post by eternityforest »

I really want to do better on this....

But at the moment I use SyncThing, and a 4TB external drive for backups. I use Back in Time, a GUI Rsync frontend.

I organize things generally first by who it's for, then by the project. I have my personal projects folder, and a clients folder.

I don't have any system for anything lower level that that, nor do I want one really. If something is used by multiple projects I'll just copy it and not have to worry about mentally refcounting.

But I might make a folder for a specific type of reusable resource and copy things to and from it.

I share pretty much exclusively via Facebook and email.

I like to very aggressively avoid DIY software in daily life if I can, I don't really have any scripts that are just for personal use although I do have a few FOSS projects, so I don't use any scripts or anything to manage files.

A lot of small stuff like my books and music collection is just straight synced between all my devices. SyncThing is pretty amazing and makes everything a lot easier.

My photos mostly start on a phone, so they are synced as well, if I delete a crappy one on the computer, or move one elsewhere, it will go away on the phone(There is a metadata record left behind by the sync engine though, unless you manually delete the record, I think it includes filenames, not sure if that's an issue for the privacy types).

Code of course is all on GitHub, I don't do any significant programming outside of projects big enough that they have their own Git repo.

I use streaming services and don't pirate anything, so I have less data to manage.

I'm just starting to approach having enough files where 1TB on my laptop isn't enough for everything I've ever made, so I think I will probably move to a NAS or cloud for some things. Backups and not that important files will go on the NAS which will have its own redundancy, more important stuff will be cloud and on my laptop if they fit.

Unfortunately, NASes with RAID are expensive Just the disks cost a ton, and then the NAS itself costs a lot if you want a nice low power commercial box with a remote access service, not some old server from eBay. Maybe I'll try a Pi Zero W 2 and USB disks.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#13

Post by alok-g »

I created a 'design' for top-level folders and a few levels beneath. A few folder names, jist to give an idea: Work, Home, Photos, Music, Singing, Purchases, Projects, Literature, Ideas, Emails, Expenses, etc. I typically update this folder hierarchy say once every 3-7 years.

I change settings in all programs like browsers to ask me each time where to save. I tend to give long descriptive names to files. I include dates in file/folder names (yyyy-mm-dd - caption) when chronology is expected (like for photo albums).

I typically have an explorer window always open with the currently relevant folders. And use keyboard shortcuts to copy- paste file and folders names when saving/downloading/openimg something.

I use Everything to search when needed. Typically I can reach anytbing just by navigating the folders.

I use big enough drives on all my computers so and sync files between them, typically using FreeFileSync (that handles deletions well).

Phone data is also kept as a subfolder within the above, though the primary copy is on the main PC, except for some data. I use SyncThing and PhomeExplorer to sync files between the phome and this subfolder.

For backups, firstly, the data is already on multiple local machines, uncompressed. I also take full backups using simple file copies (i.e. no compression, so that in case of a failure, the backup is a drop-in replacement. I do not trust 'restore' of a backup program. For making file copies, I use Syncback Freeware.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#14

Post by mickelsen »

For years, I had a system that the structure was mirrored in a synced cloud drive and my notetaking tool at the time, using sort by name to keep its order and using numbers, with the added benefit of just typing the first numbers when in the main folder to point the selection there.

00. inbox, 01. frequent (stuff that doesn't change and I keep coming back to, like an ID copy), 10. ---- (separator), 10. 2023, 11. 2022, 12. Prior, 20. ----, 21. developer, 22. wiki, 23. projects, 24. topics, ......, 30. ----, 31. archives, 32. downloads.

For each year I'd create a monthly folder (as the year progressed), inside a per-topic subfolder with the date prefixed, so results didn't repeat when using spotlight (2022-03-finance, 2022-03-career, 2021-05-retail), then inside the final subfolder with the files related to the event in particular, still with date prefixed.

Topics and Projects inside is a bit like PARA, which I added later, but the month by month one has been a staple. By the end of the month I did a sweep on the inbox folder, and put everything into the month folder with event name or somewhere else.

The thing is that during the pandemic I did a few experiments with this system and since then it's been such a mess, because I keep procrastinating on moving it back to what worked, as some things I tried later seemed to work but didn't. Things like... keep a lot of scattered notes in a doc file per topic? Or separate in my wiki as markdown? Merge 'topics' and 'wiki'? What about the documents related to an event, like a new broker account with all their contracts, signed stuff and such... less subfolders and more verbose filenames? Or more subfolders and more frequent archiving to keep old stuff out of sight?

I usually had this routine of tidying up in the days near the end of each month, kind of mirroring what I did in my day to day job in the office. Ever since commingling different spheres of my life, testing new tools and so on, it led to excessive cruft, duplicates and less organization overall, and I was just looking at improving my system where it fell short.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#15

Post by zeagle »

I used to spend a lot of time tweaking this but have had a stable solution for years now.

1. I host seafile on a vps and run seadrive on each machine with asubst to mount it as the T: drive. Everything one needs to keep is saved there; WAF is good. It handles undelete, versioning, etc with access from anywhere for laptops. Weekly my nas rsyncs the data and SQL home for backup. If vps dies I could change DNS locally to point to the NAS, start seafile and continue to use it. A desktop with a seafile client also caches everything locally. I organize with a logically directory structure. The nas does zfs.

2. I also use nextcloud for my contacts, calendar hosted on the VPS. Similar backup home but nightly.

3. FolderSync saves nightly photos of our phones to the NAS at phones\name\yyyymm\ as we don't use cloud storage. Took me some years and a broken phone to realize I need to do this. For convenience, photoview running on the NAS to review them easily. Weekly Borg backups to the VPS for offsite.

4. Something similar with paperless-ngx. I've been meaning to run a personal and work instance instead of one joint one.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#16

Post by digitalsushi »

My warning is, if you devote yourself so wholly to order, the record of your life will be all metadata and no data. I've been obsessed with this topic, as with dust free window sills, and coffee mugs with perfectly aligned handles in my cupboards; there come a day when the diary says 'read and organized diary', and those days are not days.

So I look at my desktop with 5000 files and 40 types, and with sort by date, I can approximate no worse than my own memory, a liner stream of conciousness I occassionally dump to a thumb drive or raid, but no better.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#17

Post by skydhash »

Dropbox with important data—not backup, just in case the computer dies on me.

Books and music synced across several computers. Not backed up as I can redownload them, but would prefer not to.

Documents synced with iCloud.

Movies and TV Shows on a small server (a Mac Mini) with a couple of external HDDs.

---

My Downloads folder is my inbox, as anything created by me is already in its proper folder. I go through it at least every day and add each file to the relevant library. Every once in a while, I just delete everything in this folder. I only take photos with my iPhone, which is synced with iCloud. I mostly write notes (Bear), todo lists (Things). Anything else is tied to a project, and I have something similar to PARA for them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#18

Post by quickthrower2 »

I am also disorganised but there are attractors of important data:

Bitwarden: passwords if course but also acts as an index of all online accounts and other private info.

Photos: one folder on one computer with iDrive backup

Email: lots of important info there. i need to set up some automated backup though

Microsoft Todo, Google calendar.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene?

#19

Post by quickthrower2 »

digitalsushi wrote: post #16

My warning is, if you devote yourself so wholly to order, the record of your life will be all metadata and no data. I've been obsessed with this topic, as with dust free window sills, and coffee mugs with perfectly aligned handles in my cupboards; there come a day when the diary says 'read and organized diary', and those days are not days. So I look at my desktop with 5000 files and 40 types, and with sort by date, I…

They did survive in the 70s with none of this!
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