Ask HN: How do you organize your data and maintain digital hygiene? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by nicbou » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 7:34 AM UTC

I started using syncthing recently and it's just so good.

My approach in the future is a home folder shared across all devices, although my phone only syncs a subset of those folders.

The only deviation from the usual MacOS home directory layout are the Settings folder (for all app configs worth keeping) and the Artefacts folder (for memories that are not photos). There is also a Projects folder that's mostly for code.

I sort my important documents folder by year, since their importance often correlates with the fiscal year.

The Downloads folder is a dump of temporary, disposable files. I keep it somewhat clean.

The result is that I know exactly which directories to back up, and that everything outside of my home directory is effectively disposable. It takes me about a day to get a new laptop in full running order.

The only issue is that when I'm at home, all copies of my data are in the same location. I'll fix it soon, hopefully before it bites me.

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

#22

Post by galfarragem » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 11:49 AM UTC

My "organization scheme" (as you call it) took me years to refine and match my brain/personality. Seems to be interesting to others also:

https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system

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

#23

Post by photoGrant » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

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…

Beautifully said!

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

#24

Post by sandreas » Fri, Sep 01, 2023, 5:50 AM UTC

I'm moving away from storing all of my stuff on client machines (notebooks etc).

Instead I use an efficient homeserver with Proxmox and encrypted ZFS including zfs-auto-snapshot to automatically manage snapshots, storage is one single 2TB NVMe. This is my "workhorse", where I login remotely and use web interfaces for nextcloud, OnlyOffice and so on.

Every night, I use `zfs send` to backup all snapshots to my Dell T20 width 2x10TB Seagate Exos.

For notebook clients needing to backup files I use restic to store on one single external hdd/ssd per notebook - depending on the use case. From time to time, all this goes to my Dell T20 again.

For backing up Photos and Videos from cellphones I also use my Proxmox Server - an `immich` LXC container with client software on every phone.

All this can be reached online via DynDNS, using OpenVPN port sharing on 443 with an NGINX reverse proxy, so that I can either connect via OpenVPN client or using a WebInterfaces for most of my proxmox self hosted stuff.

Off site backup is also a T20 with my parents, same config as mine syncing via zfs send.