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

91–100 of 255 posts

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

#91

Post by Flockster »

laumars wrote: post #90
w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

One of the biggest regressions in modern browsers is how they all automatically download to the Downloads folder. I really miss the dialogue you used to get where you’d get asked where you’d want to save the file (im aware you still get that if you right click and go “save as” but that’s not always possible with some sites).

That is no problem in Firefox to my understanding. Set in the options to always ask where to save the file.

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

#92

Post by janci »

laumars wrote: post #90
w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

One of the biggest regressions in modern browsers is how they all automatically download to the Downloads folder. I really miss the dialogue you used to get where you’d get asked where you’d want to save the file (im aware you still get that if you right click and go “save as” but that’s not always possible with some sites).

You can disable auto download in settings of Chrome, Firefox and many other browsers. You get the Save dialog then.

On the other hand, I like that all stuff goes to Downloads and you can handle it with your favourite file manager that is much better than zhe default save dialog.

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

#93

Post by renaudg »

w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

Sounds like the Hazel app : https://www.noodlesoft.com/

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

#94

Post by h1d »

laumars wrote: post #90
w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

One of the biggest regressions in modern browsers is how they all automatically download to the Downloads folder. I really miss the dialogue you used to get where you’d get asked where you’d want to save the file (im aware you still get that if you right click and go “save as” but that’s not always possible with some sites).

I have no need to specify it for every download. I can move them when it's done and I won't lose where my download had gone to that way. Definitely not a regression.

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

#96

Post by JohnBooty »

One thing that changed my life is z, a utility to navigate easily to arbitrary directories based on frecency. Makes dir structure a bit less relevant; with z the distance between any two dirs is effectively constant.

https://github.com/rupa/z

     	By project, by tool? What do you do with pdfs and reference stuff, surely not Dewey Decimal?
~/proj ---> all my current projects and stuff i've pulled down from GitHub so I can examine it. usually 20 or so. subdirs for employer, etc

~/Dropbox/personal ---> scanned documents, receipts, etc

~/Dropbox/work ---> subdirs per client/employer

~/Dropbox/ebooks ---> organized into subdirs by topic

~/Dropbox/pdfs ---> web pages i've "printed" to pdf for archiving/reference. organized into subdirs by topic

~/Desktop/old ---> the "junk drawer" i occasionally clean out. doesn't get too big

~/Music ---> mostly just iTunes doing its thing

I also have a truckload of media (games, movies, music) stored on external hard drives since there's not much room for it on the internal SSD.

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

#97

Post by h1d »

Everything important goes to ~/data/ and inside various folders like project/, so all I need to do for backup script is to sync that folder.

I don't put anything intentionally under Documents/ as various apps try to put stuff in there to taint the folder layout.

Temporary files downloaded just stay at Downloads/ folder unless I need to keep it for a long while and I move it under data/.

Random text notes go to Notes app tagged instead of in random text files scattered which can also embed images.

Also Desktop/ is entirely empty this way. Wallpaper is as clear as it gets.

Also stuff I no longer need access to frequently like finished project goes to local encrypted folder (macOS specific) which I can open at will with a password but otherwise stays encrypted as a single file for archival purpose.

I also put all dotfiles in ~/data/ansible/home/ which get symlinked individually to ~/, so that whenever I launch a new server, most recent version of dotfiles get deployed to servers as well. (dotfiles are written in portable way across macOS, Linux and FreeBSD)

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

#99

Post by jayjader »

laumars wrote: post #90
w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

One of the biggest regressions in modern browsers is how they all automatically download to the Downloads folder. I really miss the dialogue you used to get where you’d get asked where you’d want to save the file (im aware you still get that if you right click and go “save as” but that’s not always possible with some sites).

In Firefox there is a setting to _always_ prompt the user for the location to save the file.

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

#100

Post by GordonS »

h1d wrote: post #97

Everything important goes to ~/data/ and inside various folders like project/, so all I need to do for backup script is to sync that folder. I don't put anything intentionally under Documents/ as various apps try to put stuff in there to taint the folder layout. Temporary files downloaded just stay at Downloads/ folder unless I need to keep it for a long while and I move it under data/. Random text notes go to Notes…

This is basically why I do in Windows too - I don't use the Documents, Photos folders and the like.

I have C:\Data, with subfolders inside for various 'topics', such as a 'Projects', 'Library', 'Cash Flow', 'Home' and 'Misc', as well as a folder for each family member.

For media and archival, I have 2x 4TB drives in a RAID 1 array. This contains many thousands of photos, as well as videos and films.

I use Seafile to Sync stuff between machines, with my Seafile server storing data in Azure blob storage (which is cheaper than Azure disks).

Post reply on HN