Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

I try to make sure every name is clever enough to make me hate myself but also appreciate my wit when I try to find it in the future. Versioning is achieved by banging on the keyboard when saving the file, it's easy to tell how recent something is by the length of the 'asdljkhaoi' appended to the filename. Every once in a while I throw everything into a folder called "backup" and start fresh. I believe they go 8 deep now.

Photos: In folders named "YYYY/MM.N Descriptive event title" like "2019/05.1 Birdwalk with Stephanie". This really helps me find things later.

Technical library: Academic Topic/subtopic/ then pdf title

Music: I use beets now, which imports and organizes everything

Household: Accounts folder, Mortgage folder, Appliances folder with subfolders for each appliance containing manuals, photos, and maintenance info.

Systems folder: subfolders for various IT systems and lots of related data in them

Projects folder: topic/project name mostly, sometimes with subtopics

Documents: YYYY/topic for things that I can find by year later, like taxes, licenses. Also used as longterm archive for projects.

Software/repo for various repos that don't fit in other categories (not too happy with this)

/opt/venvs for lots of python virtual environments.

Pretty much everything is in a mirrored ZFS pool with auto-snapshots (for rewinding in the event of accidental deletions) and occasionally dumped to external drives put in fireproof/floodproof safe (and taken offsite).

The easiest way is to just show you. I'm mostly a manager unit these days so I have something similar to the following:

  /Team 1 #a team I manage
     /Program A #Some program for a customer
        /Project 1 #individual project for that program, might be a tool, a document, etc.
           /subfolder #various things organized as makes sense for the project
           /subfolder
        /Project 2
           /subfolder
     /Program B 
       /FY #each Fiscal Years, I move everything
          /Project 1
             /subfolder
          /Project 2
             /subfolder
             /subfolder
       /Project 1
       /Project 2
          /subfolder
          /subfolder
  /Team 2 #some older team I used to manage or belong to
     /
  /Team 3
     /
  /R&D #various research programs
    /FY
       /Project 1
          /subfolder
       /Project 2
          /subfolder
          /subfolder
    /FY
  /Business Development #gotta get new customers!
    /Customer 1
       /Contract Effort 1
    /Customer 2
       /Contract Effort 1
       /Contract Effort 2
    /
  /Staff # any documents I need to produce for my staff
    /Staff 1
    /Staff 2
    /
    /PreviousStaff # any staff who are no longer under me
       /Staff 1
       /Staff 2
  /Library # I point ubooquity at this
    /
  /Personal # person employment documents
  /Corporate # corporate issued materials
     /Security
     /Policies
     /

This works for me as I can usually find something within a few seconds because it all has some semantic meaning to me that works with how my memory works, and I have about half a dozen years of intense work plowed into this structure. That being said, more and more of my work is ending up in various enterprise Office things like Sharepoint, Teams, etc. Code, other documents for sharing and such stay in their appropriate Gitlab repos, Confluence/Wiki pages.

tbh, this makes it significantly harder for me to find old documents than with my system -- raw search just isn't good enough.

This is also my approach. I create one dir called myuserfiles and one dir called myuserdotfiles. The main home is used as a temp that gets sorted and docs/pics/videos get put in the correct dirs every few weeks.

One of the things I do that others might find interesting is that anything not being worked on in my gitprojs dir is sent back to the appropriate ~/myfiles/progs/$language dir. So all my ansible stuff is in one place, all my bash scripts are in one place, etc.

Also while I am an emacs person and I like dired, I have converted to ranger as my file manager and it is quite awesome.

Thanks! I'll send a mail across