Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 255 posts

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

#41

Post by jen729w »

colorcoded wrote: post #33
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. :-)

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 p…

That’s amazing to hear. Thank you!

I have come across situations where you need more than 10, yes. I plan on addressing it in a future post on the site.

If you’re able to share, I’d love to know more about your case. If not, no stress. hello@johnnydecimal.com.

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

#42

Post by jen729w »

edraferi wrote: post #28
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?

I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question. Would you mind re-phrasing?

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

#43

Post by dpacmittal »

I have my home directory on a separate partition so I don't have to lose all my files when I reinstall my OS. My downloads go to ~/Downloads. I move files from here regularly to more appropriate places.

All my projects go in ~/projects which maybe be further classified as android, web etc.

I have custom bash/python scripts in ~/scripts

All my personal photos and videos go in a separate partition, classified into year and event.

Most of my important files and documents are on Dropbox and Google drive.

I use rclone with backblaze for archival purposes.

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

#44

Post by jen729w »

gbear605 wrote: post #32
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. :-)

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.

A good question. I have an idea for handling multiple projects in an overlapping environment, but it involves typing more characters of course which you’re not going to want to do every time. (The idea is to assign each project a 3-letter prefix. So 72.02 becomes PRJ.72.02.)

I’ll think on this.

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

#45

Post by dpacmittal »

echelon wrote: post #35

Any 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.

Just use a ntfs partition for sharing files between Linux and windows.

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

#46

Post by weitzj »

- Using Gopath for all coding stuff, I.e I have a src/github .com/MYUSername/Project path as well as any other checkouts from different projects on Github or elsewhere.

Then there is a /scratch directory to dump any data, which I might need for temporary processing, but which should survive restarts

A Documents directory with Ebooks

A desktop with temporary files (mostly screenshots) and the obligatory nested folders like “old/old01”

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

#47

Post by aasasd »

echelon wrote: post #35

Any 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.

You can use NTFS, with ntfs-3g on the Linux side. I've done that and it worked smoothly, if rather slowly. FAT is just too 90s for serious use.

You'll likely want to continue using a native Linux fs for whatever you don't need to share.

Dunno about quality of any Ext drivers for Windows.

As for partitioning, back in my day people just slapped another primary partition. It's not like Windows supports Linux LVM.

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

#48

Post by lottin »

I have 3 subdirectories in my home directory:

   doc/
   incoming/
   projects/
Under doc/ I have a few sub-categories

   comp/
   edu/
   fin/
   jobs/
   lang/
   org/
   ...
This is where I put things I intend to keep, whereas projects/ is for things I'm working on. There are files in doc/ that I change often as well, so maybe I don't really need two separate directories...

And incoming/ is where downloaded files go, temporarily, until I delete them or move them to a proper location.

The only tool I use is a filename normalisation tool that I wrote myself, so that filenames don't contain spaces or capital letters which slow me down on the command line.

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

#49

Post by johnchristopher »

echelon wrote: post #35

Any 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.

Use GPT. No more 4 partitions limit and extended partition fiddling when risizing or moving stuff (that means UEFI for booting, if your computer is old you might have to spend some time in the BIOS to set things up).

You can resize live from windows (since version 7 I believe).

I'd use an NTFS partition to share files (because fat32 don't have enough prevention loss measure to my taste). NTFS partition access requires much CPU cycles though.

https://imgur.com/a/QnyCdc3

I don't remember why I still divide /root and /home. Must be a habit.

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

#50

Post by kennu »

For a long time I’ve kept everything important in project folders under ~/Projects. Each folder is a Git repository also stored in Bitbucket. I clone these on all the computers I work with.

There are some exceptions like photos, videos and music which don’t fit Git well so I keep them in their own places and backup manually. Luckily macOS provides default locations.

Post reply on HN