Ask HN: How do you organize your files

- ebooks: I don't love Calibre, but it's the only game in town.

- music: Musicbrainz Picard to get the metadata right. I've been favoring RPis running mpd as a front-end to my music lately.

- movies/TV: MediaElch + Kodi

I don't have a good solution for managing pictures and personal videos that doesn't involve handing all of it to some awful, spying "cloud" service. Frankly most of this stuff is sitting in Dropbox (last few years worth) or, for older files, in a bunch of scattered "files/old_desktop_hd_3_backup/desktop/photos"-type directories waiting for my wife and I to go through them and do something with them. Which is increasingly less likely to happen—sometimes I think the natural limitations of physical media were a kind of blessing, since one was liberated from the possibility of recording and retaining so much. Without some kind of automatic facial recognition and tagging—and saving of the results in some future-proof way, ideally in the photos/videos themselves—this project is likely doomed.

My primary unresolved problem is finding some sort of way to preserve integrity and provide multi-site backup that doesn't waste a ton of my time+money on set-up and maintenance. When private networks finally land in IPFS I might look at that, though I think I'll have to add a lot of tooling on top to make things automatic and allow additions/modifications without constant manual intervention, especially to collections (adding one thing at a time, all separately, comes with its own problems, like having to enumerate all of those hashes when you want something to access a category of things, like, say, all your pictures). Probably I'll have to add an out-of-band indexing system of some sort, likely over HTTP for simplicity/accessibility. For now I'm just embedding a hash (CRC32 for length reasons and because I mostly need to protect against bit-rot, not deliberate tampering) at the end of filenames, which is, shockingly, still the best cross-platform way to assert a content's identity, and synchronizing backups with rsync—ZFS is great and all but doesn't preserve useful hash info if a copy of a file is on a non-ZFS filesystem, plus I need basically zero of its features aside from periodically checking file integrity.

symlinks for ~/Downloads and ~/Documents into ~/Dropbox is my only interesting upgrade. Across the varying different devices I have different things selectively synced. Large media files are the only things that don't live in dropbox in some way or another. It's pretty convenient for mobile access (everything accessible from web/mobile). I've done some worrying about sensitive documents and such, but most of it is also present in my email, so I think I lost that battle already. It also means there's very little downside to wiping my HD entirely if I want to try a different OS (which I used to do frequently, but ended up settling on vanilla ubuntu).

If you're particularly asking about reference material that you take notes about and would like to search and retrieve and produce reports on, Zotero might work for you. I have many years of research notes on it - it's a hyper-bookmarking tool that can keep snapshots of web pages, keep PDFs and other "attachments" within saved articles, lets you tag and organize them along with search capabilities.

Outside of that scope, my files reside randomly somewhere in the ~/Documents folder (I use a mac) and I rely on spotlight to find the item I need. It's not super great but is workable often enough.

It's not a silly question!

edit: I've been trying to find a multi-disk solution and haven't had much success with an easy enough to use tool. I use git-annex for this and it helps to some extent. I've also tried Camlistore, which is promising, but has a long way to go.

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