Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

This is sadly so true of my own orginzation.

My only addition would be

- random documents of dubious value in “my documents”

I've thought about this a lot because I would like to keep things for a long time without it getting a mess. Since I started using Linux as my main OS six years ago, I had the chance to rethink my structure and this one still holds up through multiple reinstalls and studies/companies:

    ~/p/$projectname for bigger projects
    ~/p/$language/$projectname because there is usually
        one obvious language to use for a given project

    ~/d/$school/$subject_code for current subjects
    ~/d/$school/$year/$subject_code for previous subjects
    ~/d/$company/ documents related to the company, such 
        as a contract, correspondence, or just work
        documents. In most cases I get a company laptop,
        so then this folder is really small.
    ~/d/archive/$year/($school or $company) for old things

    ~/d/private/$YYYY-MM-DD-description can be either a
        file (such as 2019-01-01-Microsoft-support-call)
        or a folder (2019-01-Microsoft-support-case)
    ~/d/private/finances/ is one of a few special folders
        that do not use the time-based prefix. Other files
        include a passport-style picture, encrypted copy
        of passport, a folder containing my CV, etc.

    ~/Music a few things that are not on Spotify and
        audio book archive (I don't trust Audible to keep
        my library available as mp3 indefinitely).
    ~/Videos similar to Music but for videos
    ~/tmp/rm-me-on-YYYY-MM-DD files/folders which would
        previously clutter my desktop indefinitely, but
        which should survive a reboot (otherwise, /tmp)
    ~/bin/ user applications
    ~/bin/pf/ program files for ~/bin 

Unsolved problems:

~/Downloads is a huge mess. I've been thinking of symlinking this to /tmp to force myself to move out what I want to keep, but did not get around to it, so I don't know whether it's a good solution.

Programs put files in random places, mostly dot folders in my home directory such as ~/.gnupg. This causes the following:

~/old-ssd still contains files from my previous SSD, and I'm not sure how to decide which ones to keep. Every few months, I dig something up from there, so it's definitely not ready to be thrown away despite having copied the aforementioned folders.

Main SSD:

A few partitions each containing critical system images like Windows 7 and a few Linux OSs, and then all non-critical system images live within /pool. My home directory is limited to 2GB because no work happens in my hypervisor OS.

Each system image has a home directory which usually contains ~/Projects, ~/Scripts, ~/Documents/notes, ~/Documents/maps.

For literature and reference materials, I use the BISAC[0] system for storage with a folder for each heading and subheading. I feed these into Calibre which maintains its own internal library so this doesn't matter much anyway.

Linux user programs are installed in /usr/local/bin which is mounted separately. Windows user programs are installed in a junctioned folder which points to a regular HDD to take some load off the SSD, at C:\Users\\Apps and C:\Users\\Utilities. %APPDATA% and all user libraries are also junctioned and pointing to an HDD.

I have several drives split into two LVM volume groups, with some logical volumes taking up multiple drives. These volumes are passed into my VMs, which see continuous filesystems for each category of data, such as video, music, games, and documents. That way these filesystems can be extended as needed without hassle.

[0] https://bisg.org/page/bisacedition

For organizing files I can suggest a combination from meaningful folder structure and tags. Mac OS offers a great way to organize files with tags, but it is limited only for the Apple world. There are bunch of tools offering organizing files with tags, but most of them are cloud based or use databases for storing the tagging information. Both ways are locking your files in a third party systems in some way. A tool for organizing local files and folders with tags lacking these limitations is TagSpaces. If is open source and freely available from https://www.tagspaces.org

For people who haven't seen it, ncdu is great for purging cruft, it's an ncurses app that sorts by size (descending) and helps identify where to focus cleaning efforts.