Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by pengo » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

On Linux here. I have a directory for anything that needs to be backed up. That contains:

- Business (plans, invoices, tax receipts etc) - Documents (general non-business documents) - Email (Thunderbird profile folders) - Projects - Client 1 - code - docs - Client 2 - code - docs

Keeping code and docs together for each client works for me. Apache and hosts are set up to point to various web roots under ~/Projects/Clientn/docs with aliases like https://client2/. Git likewise.

Outside the "backupable" root directory are the usual folders like Downloads, Pictures, Videos etc ... I don't care if I lose anything in these locations in a meltdown.

Things were much more complicated when I ran Windows as a dev environment, but it's pretty straightforward now.

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

#172

Post by Ibethewalrus » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

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…

Hazel is great for creating rules like this. It also empties trash

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

#173

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

In my home directory I use ALL CAP directory names for stuff I don’t backup like GITHUB for repos, TENSORFLOW for library source code and examples.

Lowercase for things that I backup

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

#174

Post by zanny » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

/ and ~ are on an SSD raid so I don't put much in there.

/ssd is a 1TB mx500 I got last year that I put video games on. /ms is my Mechanical Storage disk.

https://i.imgur.com/yKwuvHk.png

All my bulk data is on the mechanical drive with regular BUP backups to a 3TB one and syncthing on most of it.

My laptop is setup the same way - / on ssd and /ms is the mechanical data drive.

Specific to project organization /ms/code is just about a thousand project directories of git repos and such, and I always setup cmake to build /ms/code/foo in /ms/build/foo. I maintain a lot of aur packages I keep in /ms/aur and build to /ms/Data/packages, and my package cache is /ms/Data/pacman.

I don't like mounting disks under ~ unless the user can actually do the mounting in their own session (ie with a systemd unit). Since only FUSE can do that and all my other drives are persistent I mount them at / even though my user owns the top level directory.

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

#175

Post by djhworld » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

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 is the dumping ground for screenshots for me. I take a lot of screenshots at work which get pasted into things like JIRA tickets, slack etc

These end up accumulating on my desktop over the years until I can be bothered to delete them

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

#176

Post by katbyte » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:38 PM UTC

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #153

chrisacky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the "old desktop (2013)" naming structure. But yeah, that's exactly me.

I never thought another human being exists who does this exactly. I bet there are millions of us!

I have a z.old with various folders in it

  - z.old/macbook.2016
  - z.old/macbook.2013
  - z.old/thinkpad.2011
  - z.old/downloads.201705
  - z.old/downloads.201701
  - z.old/desktop.2014
  - z.old/SERVERNAME.2018

going back to around 2002, I could probably delete the entire thing and not miss a thing heh

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

#177

Post by bryanculver » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

  - Random scratch files in ~/Desktop/Rug (purged monthly, no backup)
  - All development in ~/Workspace (routinely backed up)
    - Source controlled development in ~/Workspace/Repos/[entity]/[project name] (excluded from backups)
    - All non-SCed files in ~/Workspace/[entity]/[project name]
  - Downloads in ~/Downloads (purged daily of older than two weeks, not backed up)
  - Personal computer has ~/Workspace symlinked from a Dropbox folder: ~/Dropbox/Bryan/Workspace
  - Family photos in ~/Dropbox/Family/Photos/[year]/[month]/[YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS].[format]
    (routinely push-only sync to Amazon Glacier)

  * Several cron jobs to help maintain everything
  * Several custom Zsh plugins to make jumping around in shell a breeze
  * Daily bullet journal+markdown style notes auto source controlled in
    ~/Workspace/Repos/Personal/eod/[year]/[month]/[day].md

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

#178

Post by kalmar » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #175

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 is the dumping ground for screenshots for me. I take a lot of screenshots at work which get pasted into things like JIRA tickets, slack etc These end up accumulating on my desktop over the years until I can be bothered to delete them

This used to be me until I started using screenshot shortcuts that put images in the clipboard instead of files. You can paste directly into jira, slack, hangouts, whatsapp web, and many other places.

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

#179

Post by _mrmnmly » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

besides standard folders that are delivered with the OS, I tend to create folder `/projects` with my personal side-gigs and `/work` with commercial projects for other people. nothing fancy.

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

#180

Post by mtrpcic » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #175

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 is the dumping ground for screenshots for me. I take a lot of screenshots at work which get pasted into things like JIRA tickets, slack etc These end up accumulating on my desktop over the years until I can be bothered to delete them

Screenshots are a big part of my workflow too, and this made things feel a lot cleaner for me. This will automatically put all your screenshots into a specific folder (assuming you're on OSX).

    mkdir ~/Pictures/Screenshots
    defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots