Ask HN: How do you organize files on your computer?

When I found myself in your situation I went to manual backups and regular cleaning of my computers/backups. If it is important I back up immediately, if it is something I will not need regularly access too it gets taken off the computer. Mostly I started treating my digital life as I treat my physical life, I do not put an addition on my home or rent a storage space when ever I run out of space, I get rid of stuff.

On my primary backup drive I have two extra folders, archive and holding; archive has all that stuff like taxes that I rarely if ever need to access. Holding is for all that stuff I am not sure if I really need anymore but can't quite bring myself to delete, anything that spends enough time in holding to get forgotten about just gets deleted.

My secondary backup drive only holds things which are actually important and the loss of would cause more than a minor inconvenience or some sadness/regret over their loss.

My computer has essentially the standard generic file structure of Documents, Downloads, Video, Music, Desktop, and Pictures with the addition of folders for current projects and a tmp folder and none get subdivided with nested directories (but the primary backup does). When Documents and Downloads start getting difficult to navigate I clean and backup including going through my backup drives. Desktop is for stuff I want to get to somewhat soon like a pdf I want to read, tmp is for stuff I do not need on my computer on a daily basis but may need to access semi regularly in the next month or so, it gets gone through and cleaned most any time I copy something into it.

It took a little time to get used too and at the start I had to invest a fair amount of time but now it just means I spend a few minutes every day cleaning and backing up and once a week or so put in 15 to 30 minutes doing it. Not much different than any physical hobby or part of life, cleaning the kitchen after cooking or sweeping up the saw dust and putting away the tools after wood working.

If you have a receipts directory all your receipts should go in it but I would question the need for a dedicated receipts directory, if a receipt is important it should probably fall under another category (like health or taxes/writeoffs) if they don't they probably are not something you need to keep long term and can go in a temporary folder that regularly gets cleaned out, I use my documents folder for those. Other family members should have their own directory for everything that is theirs, give them a quota and let them deal with it.

I had come across this before but had forgotten the name. Thanks!

I have been doing this for more than 20 years and it has been working well for me. I have a Works folder and 26 subfolders under it, each subfolder therein starting with the same letter...

iCloud has E2EE with ADP, if that's something that would interest you.

I have been of the opinion for a long time, that the basic architecture of file systems is antiquated and needs to be replaced. Any data organization technique you devise for organizing your files using a traditional hierarchical folder structure, will quickly break down once the number of files gets really large and are spread across many storage devices.

We need to move to an 'object store' architecture that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files; attach a set of meaningful meta-data tags to each one; and find anything and everything in just a second or two of searching.

I created such a system that works exceptionally well that is currently in open beta.