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

I think you should really check out Johnny.Decimal[0] as a lot of other comments mentioned. Even if you do not apply the decimal prefixes, it will help you reconsider your file organization. The author explains well his concepts of area and categories.

About what I do. In my home directory on my computer, I have one directory called "Zarchive" where I put all the stuff I want to keep. (I called it "Zarchive" because it is a French pun. I keep "mes archives" in it.) The other directories in my home directory are symbolic links/shortcuts linking to directories in "Zarchive" or they are things I do not care to lose.

To organize things in my special directory, I first used Johnny.Decimal. Then, I got rid off the decimal prefixes because I am the sole user of this file hierarchy.

Here is a summary of the directory organization in this directory. I did not put all the directories but you get the idea.

    .
    ├── index.txt           A file explaning what each directory are for.
    ├── Configuration       Conf for my PC (dotfiles, scripts...).
    ├── Knowledge           My notes.
    ├── Media               Things I keep but I could find online or in store.
    │   ├── Books
    │   ├── Games
    │   └── Videos
    ├── Personal            All things that are personal (pictures, GTD...).
    ├── TODO                Things I should do one day (
    │   ├── 2024-08-17 Articles to read
    │   └── 2024-08-17 Phone pictures
    ├── Various             Things that I do not know where to put.
    └── Work                Anything work related (personal or professional)
        ├── Companies
        ├── Employment
        ├── Freelance
        └── Projects

The big advantage of having a good file hierarchy in one directory is that it makes archiving way way easier. For example when I sync my data with an external hard drive, I can use a script to compare what files changed and another script to copy things between my computer and the hard drive while automatically making zip in my computer to avoid losing something by accident.

Maybe I could do a full blog post on my file organization and its management if you want.

Anyway, to get back on your topic. If I were you, I would put all the files you mentioned in the directory "Personal". Now for your example for the eye doctor: or you could create a directory "2024-09-26 Eye doctor appointment" with everything in it; or you could have directories named "Receipts" and "Health", and in Health you have a symbolic link/shortcut to the receipt in Receipts; or you could have a copy of the receipt in both directory. I prefer to make each directory independent, so I am not fond of the shortcut solution.

For your family member's files, you could have a directory for each of them. Maybe you could create a directory "Family" in the top directory and each member is responsible for his or her stuff.

With that said, it does not completely remove the need to search for files. Yes after doing that you are now organized with a good file hierarchy, but that does not mean you cannot use a good tool for finding files. I do not have much suggestion on this domain because I am lucky enough to be good at remembering where I put stuff. Most of the time... :)

As a final word: I really encourage you first to read Johnny.Decimal, then to really take the time to define the areas and categories without rushing, then to organize the files, and finally to use the search tools. Some people say that you do not need to organize anything and that you can rely only on the search tools but I completely disagree. Tools are not available forever, and it does not solve the issue of syncing correctly your files and archiving them.

I hope I was clear. I did not expect rambling so much when I started to write this post. Good luck for organizing your stuff!

[0] https://johnnydecimal.com/

I take an approach a lot like this - brief straightforward lowercase names e.g.

books/

periodicals/

films/

television/

That's the root directory.

Now for subfolders I keep a numerical scheme e.g. films/000_action films/000_docudrama books/000_science/000_biology

So the 000_ prefix indicates a major class - fits well with a "grep" or to sort by name in a file browser gui both.

Then from that I can add suffixes such as 001_90s_cartoons_megaset to signify this is a massive multi-terabyte wallop of interest

The upside of this approach is structure. The downside is that if one is building a good characterization of these things you soon realize a tag-based system might be better - the filesystem forces a tree structure. If these were managed by a database/indexing system, then presumably the tags would live there (not the filesystem) and the filesystem could merely be some sort of balanced tree that maximizes performance, filenames may as well be random 64 character IDs. This approach then requires some effort to organize into the tree (much effort over decades) for some structure to "bleed through" to the filesystem. But at this scale to really manage it, it's scripts and automation and indexes all the way.

The other hard part of it is maintenance and adding new data since data tends to grow exponentially. Still manual, could be automated if I was hardcore about it. One can also build search indexes but I personally tend to do every few months a simple "find | gzip -9 > listing.txt.gz" and then grep that for fast search in the future. There are faster ways to do this algorithmically surely, but this is perhaps the fastest way as far as minimizing the amount of time & effort I put in with a good payoff ratio for "just working"

Um...poorly. Mostly the default folders, and then I search and/or remember it. It helps I don't have a profusion of files, though not for lack of effort. Many of the things have descriptive titles, though some don't (ok, a lot don't - I have one file on Microsoft word called something like 'Huh, it finally switched to aptos'; it's a short-story-in-progress with no other mention of Aptos). But typically if I want something I either remember which file it is, go through the titles (and if images previews), or search for a snippet of text I remember (File Explorer in Windows lets you do this).

I remember reading part of Algorithms to Live By that advocated that in general files on computers are a waste of time, given search, since it takes much more time to file everything than to search for it. So there's that argument. But of course I'd be biased in favor of something that justifies my file system.

What we really need is a way to have something be in two folders at once, or at least referrable ("If you're looking for eye doctor receipts, they're under Health" or something). In theory you could duplicate the file and put one in receipts and one in health, but that seems like a suboptimal plan. Maybe ways to put shortcuts to other folders in a different one, so it's still stored under, say, Health, but there's a way to get there from Receipts.

I had not heard about it. Thanks!