i often work with some kinf of text files. i tried to simulate my workspace. Folders became like real world objects. Desk, incoming post box, archive, whiteborad and so forth. Then there is a temp folder.
Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
31–40 of 255 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#32“...surely not Dewey Decimal?” Close! Johnny.Decimal. https://johnnydecimal.com I’m Johnny. Feedback much appreciated, I’m working like a busy little bee on the site as we speak. Should have a show HN app ready in a couple of months, but I’m learning JS/React as I go so it’s taking time. :-)
One issue that I see arising is the interaction with emails between your system and other Johnny Decimal systems. Say I’m running a team at the company I work at and my team uses this system jointly. Another team also uses it. I email them with an email labeled with a decimal number, and suddenly their system has items out of order.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#33“...surely not Dewey Decimal?” Close! Johnny.Decimal. https://johnnydecimal.com I’m Johnny. Feedback much appreciated, I’m working like a busy little bee on the site as we speak. Should have a show HN app ready in a couple of months, but I’m learning JS/React as I go so it’s taking time. :-)
I'm actually using Johnny decimal now, except that I ended up using 100 buckets instead of 10 because some of the categories simply had too many items in them and they would have overflowed or had no room to grow in them otherwise.
It's so nice to have a good system and never doubt where to find something and where to put a new thing.
I switched from our previous mess to Johnny decimal by using a python script that processed a table in an emacs org mode file. The script filled the rows in the table with the file and directory names and I could then assign a category to each file or directory and say what the script should do to them. Then the script showed the outline of my Johnny decimal system so I could check that's what I wanted. This made it easy to play around with possible categories for all my existing stuff until I was satisfied. In the end it copied all the files to their new home.
Thanks for creating Johnny Decimal.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#34My approach to file management is delegation: - Most files go straight to the default recommended location. This includes downloads, git repositories, programs, etc. - Source code is on GitHub. - Emails are on Gmail. - Notes and todos are on Google Keep. - Books are on Google Drive in PDF or EPUB format. - Photos and videos are on Google Photos and YouTube. - Music is on Spotify and YouTube. - Movies are on Netflix,…
Since you seem to store everything on various Google services, what is your backup strategy in case you loose access to your account?
1. Keep backup codes [1]
2. Download your data [2]
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#35Any opinions on partitioning? Or dual booting Linux and Windows?
I've been a Linux user for eons, but recently got Windows to dual boot for video editing. I'm not quite sure where to put the partition, what FS to use to share files between the two, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#36I have a few folders under home I've used regularly for many years:
docs
projects
build
bin
crap
projects contains all my various paid and personal programming and hardware projects; each in their own subdirectory.
build is a playground for building and trying out new software.
bin contains non-packaged executables. I find /usr/local/bin to be a poor alternative because it has to be moved separately when I install a new OS.
crap contains subdirectories in the format YYYYmmdd. E.g. 20190105. Whenever I accumulate too much crap in my home directory, I move it all to ~/crap/$(today)/. today is an alias for date +%Ymd.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#37On my Nas:
Backups
Games
Incoming
Media
- audio
- books
- photo
- video
Projects
Software
Unsorted
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#38The single best thing I've done to keep my home folder organized is to empty my downloaded files regularly. I have a systemd timer that removes everything from ~/Downloads once a day, as well as all ~/Pictures/Screenshot* . 99% of the things we download we don't really need, and it's a great habit to move things you _do_ want to keep because then you have to say where is the right place for them.
Also, for ~/Music - I use Beets (beets.io) and it saves me so much time.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#39I gave up.
Kinda.
Nowadays I make a folder for everything (even if there is only one file in it) but not subfolders ever.
Movies and TV shows live in ~/Videos, Music in ~/Music, downloads in ~/Downloads and are moved to ~/Download/Archives if binaries or drivers or computer things that I might need later. ~/Documents is huge but it contains everything but only folders and it has a ~/Documents/Archives for things not needed anymore. ~/Documents is ideally for documents not produced by me. Those produced by live in ~/Dropbox (1 Tb).
I have a ~/Dev with a ~/Dev/Documentation (produced by me), ~/Dev/DocRoot, ~/Dev/tmp (for experiments), ~/Dev/containers, etc.
~/Desktop is empty.
~/Images is for memes I'll never look at again (digital hoarding) and that wallpaper I have been using for years.
There is a ~/.notmine but it's not mine, don't know what's in there or who put it there and who manages that content.
On Windows I have %USER%\Desktop\Documents because %USER%\Documents is insane (every app put things there that aren't mine).
The most important step for me that removed clutter was putting everything in its own folder.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#40[deleted]