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

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

#1

Post by curious_soul »

Currently I just have folders for high level topics like Media, Finance, Projects, etc. It works, but as I accumulate more and more files every year, I am finding my current nested folder structure sub-optimal. Some examples of problems I run into:

* Finding files becomes difficult

* Confusion when there is ambiguity: e.g. does my eye doctor's receipt belong under Receipts or Health?

* Having other family member's files also on the same computer.

I was curious how other people go about it. Is there some organization system you use? Is there some software that can make this easier?

Thanks.

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

#2

Post by BillyTheMage »

Personally I use a single folder named "kb" (short for knowledgebase). This folder contains every single file I've considered worthy of saving. I keep backups and sync between all devices.

The secret is in the naming conventions. I've written about mine extensively here on HN [1], so I won't go into too much detail here, but for your receipt example I'd do `fin.receipt.[date].eye-doctor-visit.png`.

Family members files should be in those people's home folders. Mixing people on one account is just asking for trouble in my opinion. If they're an enumerable number of important documents, consider a central family folder which gets backed up frequently, with a subfolder for each person and one for shared family stuff.

- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370673#41373817

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

#3

Post by k310 »

I have some very broad categories as you mentioned, but since I take and screensnap countless pictures, I could really use: 1. OCR that goes into and tags every file, and 2. Image categorization.

Various services do one or the other (I dropped Evernote and don't use Google) but it would be nice on my private system. I use Apple picture tools mostly for amusement. They are extremely limited at categorizing.

I have been around computers long enough to know that any software which isn't open source will go away long before my data goes away, or will be M&A'ed into something more expensive with a subscription. So I don't venture far from basic tools, even though there may be some wonderful $1595.00 app out there.

I even lost the script that grabs the first line of a PDF with an inscrutable arxiv file name and renames the file.

I'm afraid that as an old-timer, I might become like young people who have no idea of a file system, and rely on search. Search could be a lot better with my two requests above. And FOSS, please, so tools don't vanish or get priced into the stratosphere.

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

#5

Post by eternityforest »

I have a top level "Projects" folder, one subfolder per project.

I have a "Clients" folder, One folder per other person or company, I'm doing anything for, a subfolder per project.

I have "Archive" which syncs to all my devices, and from my phone it syncs to Google Docs. From my laptop it is backed to a Synology NAS with the rest of my disk. I use it for things I will actually want to see in ten years.

I have music/videos/books folders, and I also have a "Collected" folder for anything downloaded that I think I want to keep(Sorted by category in a low effort manner).

I don't make enough for deductions to be a thing, so I don't really have any accounting to do that isn't already done by some cloud platform somewhere.

I don't see why multiple people's files would be in one account, that sounds like a hassle.

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

#6

Post by noud »

KISS. In my home folder (*nix based):

  bin/
    ...all personal bash scripts can be found here...
  documents/
    audiobooks/
    backups/
    books/
    personal/
    projects/
    videos/
    work/
  downloads/
  hosts/
    ...sshfs to all important folders on several servers, no sync...
  images/
  music/
  share/
    ...for locally installed software, no sync...
  temp/
    ...remove all files in this folder once a month, no sync...
I (r)sync these folders with all my computers once every day. I have used this structure for the last 15 years. Therefore, I know by heart where to find what. Perhaps I could move the downloads folder into my temp folder. I don't know why I don't.

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

#9

Post by curious_soul »

BillyTheMage wrote: post #2

Personally I use a single folder named "kb" (short for knowledgebase). This folder contains every single file I've considered worthy of saving. I keep backups and sync between all devices. The secret is in the naming conventions. I've written about mine extensively here on HN [1], so I won't go into too much detail here, but for your receipt example I'd do `fin.receipt.[date].eye-doctor-visit.png`. Family members fil…

Thanks! This is the kind of thing I was interested in - some inspiration for naming/tagging or some novel approaches to organizing data. I came across this blog post which I thought was interesting: https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/

Regarding family members, these are just some important docs and such of family members that are not tech savvy/don't use my computer.

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

#10

Post by curious_soul »

paulcole wrote: post #7

I will put stuff like tax returns and my apartment lease into iCloud and just delete everything else. I never end up coming back to anything and thinking about organizing files is just not fun to me.

I don't like having my data in the cloud. I just use syncthing for now for backups, but setting up a proper NAS and improving my backup strategy is on my todo list.
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