You may also want to check out: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
...and look at the "My Filesystem" section.
Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
121–130 of 182 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#122Save files to my desktop. When it gets too messy, I throw everything in a folder called "Cleanup". Repeat. When it gets messy again, I rename the Cleanup folder to Cleanup_ , then throw that and everything else in a new folder called "Cleanup". I'm about 7 deep at the moment.
Almost the same, unless I don't put it on desktop but documents. From the algorithmic perspective, it's really efficient and it's like a linked list:
Read and write heavy on the head (Desktop/documents).
Keep the head lean from time to time.
Occasionally read from the tail, the efficiency is acceptable. It's like archeology, the more recent, the easier to reach.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#123Projects go in /
Every year I move the currently active projects forward as I touch them. Unless it makes sense to leave them in the old year. They aren’t archived, can still be worked on, they just aren’t necessarily cluttering the current year. And I have a script (bash function) for navigating them. ‘work’ cd’s me to the current year. ‘work ——-‘ (3 dashes) goes 3 years back. ‘work 2016’ goes straight to that year.
Projects are created at the drop of a hat. Super lightweight, no need for it to be important, formal, or even mine. Cloning something from github? Goes right into the current year.
The current year is in dropbox. Everything else is not. There’s also a special directory that holds stuff that doesn’t go in the cloud.
Also have a script for labeling the current directory with tags for easy grepping.
It works ok. There are a few rough edges. Like I might be playing with markdown one year and then again a few years later and end up with two markdown directories, in different years. Whatever. I can usually find old work for reference pretty easily.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#124Manually and imperfect but it works. Clients and Sides folders are the most used. Client folders usually have Site (for latest), Concept, Drafts, Logos, general files, etc. Downloads gets cleaned of anything massive, occasionally sorted, but otherwise just left alone - mostly serves as a museum years later. Then Business (Quotes, Invoices, various business-related ventures, Employees, Banking, Financials, etc) and Personal (house, hobbies, cars, the children, etc).
Day to day, there are usually 5-7 external drives directly connected - Lightroom catalogues by year, video source file storage, cache drives for video editing, etc. For source videos, I've settled on YYYY > Project or area, MMMM. That seems to work for my scale at this point.
I have a friend who spends more time on perfecting his file structure than creating anything. I strive to avoid that!
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#125Save files to my desktop. When it gets too messy, I throw everything in a folder called "Cleanup". Repeat. When it gets messy again, I rename the Cleanup folder to Cleanup_ , then throw that and everything else in a new folder called "Cleanup". I'm about 7 deep at the moment.
I was discussing browser tabs with others.
I usually middle click a bunch of articles on HN, then go read all the tabs until there are none left. I close by browser often.
But one of my friends, he keeps every tab forever. He always has everything at his fingertips, but a reboot or power loss is a crisis.
So I discovered talking to other that MANY do that too. hundreds of tabs is not as uncommon as you would imagine.
And so is this desktop piles-o-files pattern.
I wonder if the answer to all this is to adapt to human nature. Allow hundreds of browser tabs. Allow everything to be thrown on the Desktop.
and help people cope with the madness somehow.
(oh and the Desktop method is my method too, except periodically OLD and OLD/OLD and OLD/OLD2 get migrated from my SSD Desktop to my hard disk old-desktop)
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#126This thread is already 8 hours old, but the advice should also be classified by how long the commenter has been using their methods.
A person who has a couple years (or less) organizing their files and folders is very different from someone who used their methods for 10+ years and didn't lose the data.
Speaking of losing data, having a working backup/restore strategy is a critical part of a workable organization method.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#127 ~/Code
~/Code/bin # symlink to ~/Code/for/all/dotfiles/bin,
is in $PATH
~/Code/build # stuff I don't actually write code for
but I do want the repo downloaded
~/Code/for/all # opensource projects
~/Code/for/all/dotfiles # my dotfiles, homedir has symlinks to
here
~/Code/for/me # private projects
~/Code/for/$client # projects for said client
~/Code/for/$client/for/$clientOfClient # projects for said client of client
~/Documents/Personal # symlink to Nextcloud
~/Documents/Personal/$myName
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/1 Income
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/2 Tax deductions
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/3 Housing
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/4 Utilities
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/5 National taxes
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/6 Local taxes
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/7 Healthcare
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/8 Insurance
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/9 Education
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/10 Transportation
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/11 Subscriptions, internet, TV and contributions
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/12 Banking, savings and investments
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/13 Loans
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/14 Retirement
~/Documents/Personal/$myName/15 Receipts, invoices and warranties
~/Documents/Personal/$fianceName # same structure as above for me
~/Documents/Work # symlink to company Google Drive
~/Documents/Work/Assets # any image/video assets etc. provided
to me
~/Documents/Work/Designs # frontend designs not in sketch cloud,
mostly for clients of clients who have
a third party designer
~/Documents/Work/In # documents someone else wrote
no subdirectories here other than
splitting by client, but tags are
heavily used to link a doc to a project
~/Documents/Work/In/$client
~/Documents/Work/In/$client/
~/Documents/Work/In/$client/$clientOfClient
~/Documents/Work/Out # documents I wrote, again no subdirs
~/Documents/Work/Out/$client
~/Documents/Work/Out/$client/$clientOfClient
~/Nextcloud/Application Support # mackup location for things not in the
dotfiles repo
~/Nextcloud/Public # dump directory for shared files
Passwords are on a bitwarden_rs server and I mostly use the browser clients for Bitwarden and the Alfred workflow to access them.
Books.app for ebooks but there's no organisation needed there, I just rely on the search function.
Video's are on my Plex server.
iCloud Drive is just used to store templates for Pages, Numbers and Keynotes.
OneDrive is a tool to transfer things to and from Windows testing machines.
I don't have local music anymore these days.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#128Save files to my desktop. When it gets too messy, I throw everything in a folder called "Cleanup". Repeat. When it gets messy again, I rename the Cleanup folder to Cleanup_ , then throw that and everything else in a new folder called "Cleanup". I'm about 7 deep at the moment.
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#129While I like the Mac default folders in ~, there’s too many applications out there now that abuse Documents or add things there. So I made a Docs and Code folder in Dropbox.
For me, one of the major things that helps is having an _unpaid_ Dropbox subscription. Because I have a limited amount of space, I always ask the question how important is this file and should it be in my Dropbox. This kinda nukes most files - I’ve found most things I download from the web to be ephemeral or application launchers.
For Docs - I store all my personal IDs, taxes and documents (I was an immigrant in the US and it’s so much easier to have my ids on my phone in case of an emergency).
For Code - these are projects that I’m not backing up to Github yet. The rest are on Github
For photos I have Amazon Drive and for music I have Spotify. That’s cleaned the clutter a lot. The easiest way to stay organized is weirdly enough to offload it to the cloud. I have some other things like PDFs and EPUBs for my Kindle that go into Reading in Dropbox.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#130I'm on windows, i have a bunch of folders in C:\Data. I sometimes use the "Everything" app to find stuff by file name. It instantly searches the whole drive. I don't use pdfs much, and I don't find I need to search for them. If I did I'd either have to give them useful names to be found by "Everything" or set up some kind of full text search app.