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Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#211

Post by egypturnash »

jen729w wrote: post #205
egypturnash wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chunking stuff into sets of ten is a good idea, memorizing the arbitrary numbers I’m not so sure about, but... “An important restriction of the system is that you’re not allowed to create any folders inside a Johnny.Decimal folder.” WHAT WHY Like let’s say I’m using your example structure and I am working on a new marketing campaign. With a ton of moving parts to it - new logos to make, contracts to sign and save, we…

Ha! Well... Your use-case needs a bit more thought, and doesn't fit the simple "marketing" example on the website. But that's the beauty of my system – it forces you to actually think about your business , about how you arrange things. It makes you deconstruct it in your mind in order to create that model. I personally find that very instructive in and of itself. "Hundreds of files for each campaign" is clearly somet…

I can’t imagine making it work for me, to be honest. I’m looking at some finished projects and I’ve got more than ten subdirectories in most of them. Obviously this works for you but it sure sounds impractical for stuff like what you can see a hint of in http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/01/Scre... ...

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#213

Post by JasuM »

- Random stuff all over ~/

- User-specific bin folder ~/LocalApps (with lots of scripts)

- Projects etc. in a GoCryptFS-encrypted directory synced with Syncthing with NAS (with NFS+Kerberos on my desktop rather than Syncthing). Vendor-directories (/vendor/, /node_modules/) are not encrypted as not to slow down development, they are bind-mounted to a cleartext directory.

- PDFs, MP3s, etc. in Dropbox

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#214

Post by notemaker »

Slightly OT, but I yesterday launched my script [1] to go through 2 decades of family photos (200GB) that are structured in no sensible way (i.e tree depth of over 6 and over 500 folder with no descriptive names) and organize them.

The script will copy the files, ignoring duplicates, and format them as follows. Files are renamed to their date of creation (when the photo/video was taken/shot), e.g. 2019.01.07_08.28.34.jpg, and then stored in folders sorted by year.

ETA is 40 hours for the remaining 150GB. I suspect that the bottleneck is my network (running the script on my PC, but the photos are available through NFS). I assume it would go much faster if photos are stored on the same computer as the script is being run on.

Anyway, I thought this might be relevant for anyone who wants to get a grip of their photos :)

PS: would greatly appreciate style/performance/correctness tips on the code AND recommendations of any other naming strategy you deem better than my approach!

[1]: https://github.com/johan-andersson01/photo_renamer

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#215

Post by jen729w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #210
jen729w wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can certainly be an issue, yes. It's not one I personally have come across yet as I tend to have quite distinct 'domains' that don't change much. At work, I'm a contractor and I typically spend 1-3 years on a project. Each gets its own system, nice and simple. My home system has 10-19 capturing all of my 'personal, daily life' which leaves plenty of areas for my personal projects. For instance, 50-59 is Johnny.D…

To clarify: for all those activities you listed, you used a separate JD system for each, or were they all within the same system? I really like this idea, and am reading through the site right now, and my main fear is that I'll quickly run out of top-level categories.

Separate! Absolutely separate.

I need to write another page explaining this. You may have many non-overlapping ‘domains’, whose numbers don’t relate to each other at all. You just have to keep them separate: home computer, work computer. This job, the next job. Etc.

The system running my personal life has been going since 2012. Meanwhile, those other jobs have come and gone.

Maybe it’s just me – clearly I have a mind that loves numbers – but I haven’t found it confusing at all.

Weirdly I have found that I have developed my own internal standards. I generally need to travel with work, and that always ends up being ‘16 Travel’.

(10-19 is usually “Administration” at work.)

High on my list of stuff to write is a whole bunch of example pages. Drop me an email if you’d like me to let you know when they’re done.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#217

Post by TeMPOraL »

jen729w wrote: post #215
TeMPOraL wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify: for all those activities you listed, you used a separate JD system for each, or were they all within the same system? I really like this idea, and am reading through the site right now, and my main fear is that I'll quickly run out of top-level categories.

Separate! Absolutely separate. I need to write another page explaining this. You may have many non-overlapping ‘domains’, whose numbers don’t relate to each other at all . You just have to keep them separate: home computer, work computer. This job, the next job. Etc. The system running my personal life has been going since 2012. Meanwhile, those other jobs have come and gone. Maybe it’s just me – clearly I have a min…

Thanks!

I don't find the numbers confusing either. It's just my mind couldn't accept that you could fit everything in your life in 10 areas x 10 categories structure (well, 9x9 really, since 0s are for metadata). So thanks for clarifying (and this definitely needs to go on the page, IMO).

If I may ask here, how do you handle things that cut across two or more of your existing systems? Do you duplicate things? Or use references with target collection name, e.g. "Work Computer 12.34 Some shared stuff"?

I'll drop you an e-mail too.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#218

Post by HaGoijer »

I use a system where I've a max of 7 sub directories per directory. In that way I can quickly navigate to the directory or file I'm looking for.

It is based on the theory that one can process up to 7 items quickly. (Currently, I've no reference to this).

This implies that when a directory becomes too 'crowded', I add sub directories for further categorization. E.g. a directory containing an archive consultancy projects is split based on year of project. The current year is split up by proposal, ongoing, and archive.

For each project directory, I use standard sub-directories: Analysis, Input, Data, Report, Visuals, PM (Project Management) The difference between Input and Data is qualative and quantative data from the client.

Probably room for improvement, but it works quite good. For now a 80/20 trade off not to invest in a better system.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#219

Post by wingerlang »

I keep quite literally everything in my Dropbox folder.

I use Hazel to automatically clean my desktop by moving progressively older files into Downloads -> Clean up. The clean up folder is also in my Dock, so that I can move one or two item into the trash easily whenever something shows up there.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#220

Post by notemaker »

notemaker wrote: post #214

Slightly OT, but I yesterday launched my script [1] to go through 2 decades of family photos (200GB) that are structured in no sensible way (i.e tree depth of over 6 and over 500 folder with no descriptive names) and organize them. The script will copy the files, ignoring duplicates, and format them as follows. Files are renamed to their date of creation (when the photo/video was taken/shot), e.g. 2019.01.07_08.28.34…

While I initially avoided looking for any similar project (because I want to build it myself!) I now discovered elodie [1] which seems to serve the same purpose as my script.

For any others than myself, that might be more suitable.

[1]: https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

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