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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?

#71

Post by owaislone »

amenghra wrote: post #30

- bunch of random files in ~/Desktop/ - more random files in ~/Desktop/old/ - more more random files in ~/Desktop/old/old/... - real stuff in ~/dev and ~/Site/ - a mix of important and unimportant files in ~/Downloads/

- Desktop has the same fate this ^. Have a CLI tool that takes everything from the desktop and puts it in ~/Desktop/cleaned/

- ~tools/dotfiles/ hosts all dotfiles with a Makefile that sets everything up

- ~tools/ - contains mostly useful utilities and scripts like fonts, vpn configs, terminal color schemes, config patches to apply to `/etc/` after fresh install etc.

- ~Projects// for paid work projects

- ~Projects/ for personal projects

- ~Playground/ for experiments, prototypes or building software from github out of curiosity

- ~Applications/ for apps I build from source and copy/link binaries to `~/bin`. I'm on Linux so this is non-standard.

- ~GoogleDrive/ for Google drive sync with Insync

- ~Vaults/ for mounting cryfs encrypted directories from the Google Drive directories. (some times use plasma vault for this)

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

#73

Post by jason_slack »

owaislone wrote: post #71
amenghra wrote: post #30

- bunch of random files in ~/Desktop/ - more random files in ~/Desktop/old/ - more more random files in ~/Desktop/old/old/... - real stuff in ~/dev and ~/Site/ - a mix of important and unimportant files in ~/Downloads/

- Desktop has the same fate this ^. Have a CLI tool that takes everything from the desktop and puts it in ~/Desktop/cleaned/ - ~tools/dotfiles/ hosts all dotfiles with a Makefile that sets everything up - ~tools/ - contains mostly useful utilities and scripts like fonts, vpn configs, terminal color schemes, config patches to apply to `/etc/` after fresh install etc. - ~Projects/ / for paid work projects - ~Projects/…

+1 for Playground/ I was just trying to decide where to put some experiments I was working on and Tests/ just didn't look right :-)

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

#76

Post by eps »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #34
ech000 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you seem to store everything on various Google services, what is your backup strategy in case you loose access to your account?

1. Keep backup codes [1] 2. Download your data [2] [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538 [2] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190

I think the GP meant what if Google erroneously block access to your account for a supposed T&C violation or what have you.

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

#77

Post by franciscop »

For my coding projects, many start as a mockup/jsfiddle first. Then I got a ~/projects folder where all maker projects go when they get slightly more serious.

My "random stuff" folder is mostly ~/Downloads, with up to 5 files also in my ~/ folder. I regularly clean those and either put those files in a more stablished folder or delete them.

The other mess I got is ~/Pictures, I keep having to revisit and clean them but I don't even know how to start.

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

#78

Post by rcarmo »

I run all my computers in roughly the same way, be they Mac or Windows (although I don’t have Dropbox on my Windows machines, and OneDrive for Business runs only on my work machines):

- Everything goes into a cloud-backed folder (even git repos)

- I follow a Mac-like hierarchy on all services (Documents, Development, Library, Pictures, etc.)

- Inside each top-level folder, I have subfolders for each context (Personal, Customers, GitHub, Travel, Expenses, etc.)

- Any truly confidential files go into encrypted disk images that are also synced to the cloud (old habit from pre-Dropbox days). Each image has a similar hierarchy inside.

Some example filenames:

- ~/Dropbox/Documents/Home/Blueprint.blend

- ~/Dropbox/Pictures/Unsorted (exported from iCloud for triage)

- ~/Dropbox/Pictures/To File/2018/12 (Good pics from Xmas)

- ~/Dropbox/Development/GitHub/piku (my PaaS wrapper)

- ~/OneDrive/Development/Infrastructure/terraform-azure-ha (an ongoing work sample)

- ~/OneDrive For Business/Library/Presentation Resources

- ~/OneDrive For Business/Customer Deliverables/WidgetCo/Project X

Being systematic helps. And yes, I keep git repositories on both Dropbox and OneDrive (accessible to WSL in the latter case), and it has worked flawlessly for ages, even across platforms. As long as you’re the single human accessing them, they work fine and sync across without conflicts or corruption.

Edit: I don’t keep files on the Desktop unless they’re a slide deck I’m going to present within a few hours or shortcuts to stuff for demos, and have scripts to tidy up my Downloads folder as well...

Oh, and I name my work documents ‘YYMMDD Foobar.ext’, too. Helps tremendously when you go back to a project to place things in time, and also in searches (I seldom have to type more than 4 digits to get to a file)

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

#79

Post by xte »

On physical side:

- two SSDs for the OS and part of the /home data in mirror

- two HDDs without raid for rest of my data

On logical side: mdadm+LUKS+lvm+nilfs2 for most of volume, /boot in ext4

On home taxonomy:

- a "document" tree, mostly pdfs and org files about taxes, invoices, scanned tickets, home/car/* documents etc in there I also have my maildir mounted from a separate LV volume, and few dirs are "live" few are "archives". I have few scripts that check for age and add "to be deleted/reviewed" older files in org-agenda but are only a awful spaghetti code collection that cover only few cases... Mostly guarantees period for stuff I buy, expire period for some tax-related docs etc...

- a "knowledge base / library" tree with mostly org and pdfs files + few images/video/audio it's a mix between a personal wiki in org and a pdf-libraries plus extras and few still-to-be-migrated leftovers (ZIM Wiki used in the past and others)

- a "work" tree composed mostly of text files with very few binaries, it include a small fossil (VCS) wiki and few stuff are bind-mounted in personal "KB/KL"

- a "miscellaneous" tree composed of all that's not documents nor book nor work stuff

- a "multimedia" tree composed on personal videos/photos and few movies

- a "temporary" tree for anything that need to be categorized, that do not last longer etc. All files inside are "monitored" with a simple find+ls script, file older than a year are reported weekly on my org-agenda with a proper dired link and are mostly leftovers I periodically delete.

- an "environment" tree contains my configs mostly inside org mode, other simply "drop in" like firefox profiles, other still to be org-ifyed or nix-ifyed via homeManager... Relevant configs are bind-mount to proper dotdirs in home via global hwconfig.nix (NixOS).

- a standalone "Desktop" dir, empty since few X apps keep creating it... About freedesktop dirs my download dir is ram-mounted in /tmp/download since anything I download and not refile somewhere is garbage.

As "todo when I have time and desire" I plan to:

- completely org-ify my configs, NixOS included so I can deploy my new desktop directly via Emacs, or to be more precise a stripped-down emacs with only relevant configs booted from a NixOS custom live image. Actually I'm quiet ready only for my mail setup (my_mails.org witch contains notmuch, mbsync, IMAPFilter and afew configs etc tangled in their relevant places) and a custom NixOS iso with add Emacs but not run it at login...

- use afew to completely replace IMAPFilter and add to afew tagging some "mail-management" query to help keep my maildir clean (like "all mail from $biped that are not flagged or have other extra tags except attachments and have more than two year" => mark for garbage collection)

- extend and generalize in a single script my actual awful collection of auto-doc-refilers (script that are executed by notmuch post-new hooks to automatically collect and refile regular phone&c bills to docs taxonomy, add agenda's todos for electricity bills that are NOT (sgrunt) attached as pdfs but force me to log in to EDF portals to download them manually just to have a proof I received them... etc).

- consolidate and cleanup a bit with some kind of periodicity/strategy instead of "when I feel in the mood of cleanup following an incoherent agenda reminders about old files...

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

#80

Post by omeid2 »

Using domain names and symbolic links. Seriously.

    github.com/omeid/upower-notify
    omeid.net/family/photos
    omeid.net/friends/joe/2018-royal-national-park-hike -> omeid.me/hikes/2018/royal-national-park
    omeid.me/hikes/2018/royal-national-park -> omeid.me/hikes/royal-national-park/2018
    omeid.me/blog
    omeid.me/id
    some-company-i-work-for.com/projects/alpha-transit
    some-company-i-work-for.com/legal/contracts -> omeid.me/contracts/some-company-i-work-for.com
    some-department.some.gov.au/projects/speed-view -> github.com/some-department-speed-view
And so forth.
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