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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?

#21

Post by hambos22 »

I use OSX.

Projects: I have a Shared folder on ~ which has bidirectional sync with my desktop (with Resilio[1]). Inside that folder are my current projects. The old ones, are on private git repos (the codebase) and on backblaze (full replicated production project, with rclone[2]). I use Resilio because its fast, reliable and it supports ignore patters (eg node_modules)

Dotfiles: For syncing my dotfiles, ssh keys and app settings across my machines I use Mackup[3]. Life saving tool. My macbook has the exact same settings as my desktop and vice versa. I keep all my settings in a Dropbox folder and they are symlinked automatically on the machine.

General: I have 3 subfolders on Downloads. Chrome, Attachments and Torrents. Each one is self explanatory. I like my downloads to be organized, because I clean them up occasionally. I use Desktop as a temp area, therefore I don't have permanent files there. All my documents (financial, reports etc) are on Dropbox organized by year.

[1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ [2] https://rclone.org/ [3] https://github.com/lra/mackup

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

#22

Post by MaulingMonkey »

Everything inside I:\home\ with over a decade of shifting hierarchical patterns slowly accumulating.

Under I:\home\: archive, art, bin, configs, data, financial, logs, media, notes, photos, projects, scans, scripts, utility, vms, website, writing. (I should merge utility into bin...)

I:\home\archive\ is a mostly write-only repository of backups of other stuff (exports of bookmarks, email, old computers, old installers/isos I want to keep, etc.)

I:\home\media\ is mostly external media and further subdivided into: blender, books, comics, composing, documentation, downloads, flash, midi, music (mp3s), pdfs, pictures, recorded, screenshots, sounds, ttyrecs.

I:\home\notes\ is an ever shifting collection of .txt files, only going one or two more folders deep (fiction, game design, gaming, hobby, jobs, journaling, productivity, programming, security, self, social, style, web, etc.)

I:\home\projects\ is currently mostly a flat list of programming projects, mostly gamedev related - I have custom tools to scan it for .projnfo sub-directories containing screenshots and known files like description.txt for metadata, which are compiled into a single easy to scan html page to rediscover projects I've previously abandoned. I abuse prefixes / naming schemes to organize stuff some too (E.g. mmk.foo.bar for typescript libs, libMmk* for C++ libs, mmk_xyz for Rust projects, CamelCase for C#, www_xyz for non-library typescript projects). Current exceptions to the flat list all start with an underscore: _other (other people's projects I'm contributing to or building), _test (throwaway projects for testing compiling things), _templates (copyable projects), _nupkg (local C# nuget packages). Previously I also had "new", "stable", and "dead" categories, but I got rid of them as not useful and making my project paths unstable.

My bookmarks are a little more consistent/'modern': A bunch of icon-only bookmarks directly on my bookmarks bar, one layer of top level categories (currently "Life", "Work/Dev", "Art", "Music", "Play", "Self & Social") with one more layer of subcategory underneath that. I configured a "search engine" such that typing "b asdf" searches my bookmarks with the url chrome://bookmarks/?q=asdf , which is the most important bit - the folders are often just there to give me search terms.

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

#25

Post by beatgammit »

I'm on Linux and use primarily command line tools for development, so I often go the path of least resistance.

I use Go quite a bit, which expects (well, not as much anymore) everything to be under `GOPATH`. Instead of messing with build scripts setting environment variables, I just set my GOPATH in one place and use a tool to check out specific versions of dependencies. It's convenient to set `GOPATH` to be my home directory, so my code projects (even non-Go projects) live in `~/src/...`, and documentation lives in each repository.

For personal stuff, I use:

- Documents - tax returns and other important docs - Pictures - screenshots and other mostly-worthless images - Downloads - anything temporary; gets cleared out periodically and serves as my "temp" dir - dot files for configuration (I don't back these up on a repo or anyone, I manually copy the 5 or so files I need) - network share - anything large or somewhat important that only gets accessed occasionally (ISOs, family movies/pictures, etc); rely on RAID to protect it - large HDD - games, VMs, and other large data that's not very important - a few directories in my home directory

Documents and a few random directories get backed up off site (tarsnap), and the rest is on code hosting (mix of BitBucket, GitHub, and GitLab).

Things are somewhat orderly, but not really well thought-out. For anything that the system uses, I put it wherever the system expects it (~/.local, /etc, etc). I don't worry about it too much, and I try to purge useless crap every few months (usually aim to delete a few gigs at least, which is usually a few hundred files).

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

#26

Post by janci »

All downloaded files go to huuge ~/Downloads. Files to be preserved are then moved to more appropriate location. From time to time I delete oldest and biggest files from Downloads.

Photos and videos go to Personal folder organized by year and event (ie. 2018/Cristmas). Web development is in /var/www, /var/node per-project. NetBeans projects in default location Company stuff to $companyName/documents $companyName/projects etc. Documents that are related to specific point in time are prefixed with YYYY or YYYYMMDD. Documents that are subject to change are siffixed by v1, v2... Movies go to movies folder, ebooks and audio books to books folder - organized per-title. Music goes to music folder in artist/album structure. Disk images, install packages go to Install folder. Personal documents are just a messy Documents folder.

Symlinks are used when data is stored in other location than it belongs to (ie. due to size or fixed path requirements)

I have few tmp folders where is stuff that I can afford lose at any time (but I am too lazy to delete)

I backup all important folders with rsync to remote location.

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

#27

Post by synesso »

beatgammit wrote: post #25

I'm on Linux and use primarily command line tools for development, so I often go the path of least resistance. I use Go quite a bit, which expects (well, not as much anymore) everything to be under `GOPATH`. Instead of messing with build scripts setting environment variables, I just set my GOPATH in one place and use a tool to check out specific versions of dependencies. It's convenient to set `GOPATH` to be my home…

That whole GOPATH thing is the reason I could never stick with Go. I'm curious to learn how it's less invasive now. Thanks for the heads up.

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

#28

Post by edraferi »

jen729w wrote: post #20

“...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. :-)

If you have no more than 10 buckets and no more than 10 categories per bucket, why not just use 0-9 for each?

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

#29

Post by osrec »

One download folder, one temp folder, one repos folder, one apps folder. Everything I care about is a git repo in the repos folder, replicated in 2 other locations. Everything else, I don't mind losing (temp and download are pretty transient anyway and apps can always be downloaded again).
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