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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?

#181

Post by ocdtrekkie »

I actually do classify my eBooks with Dewey decimal numbers, but like a library they also have barcode/reference numbers, and hence are stored by those. I recently wrote a feature for my home automation system to retrieve them for me so I can read them when I am not at home. My older actual "library database" software is from 2010, and doesn't actually interact with the file storage at all. I'm now working on connecting the two systems a bit.

I have a few main folders Library, Projects, Website, etc. They're mostly uninteresting, I'm more proud of how I back them up. Everything syncs offsite, I've got multiple hard drives in multiple sites. The other thing I try to do is to use a common drive letter between PCs. So my Music folder is at the same location on any PC, for instance.

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

#182

Post by mediocrejoker »

JohnBooty wrote: post #96

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…

I thought 'freceny' was a typo until I clicked the link, but sadly the man page doesn't really explain what it is.

Could you maybe give a few examples of how you might find something eg. using find(1), and then how you could find it using z?

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

#183

Post by suncin »

I use GNU/Linux and use the default layout.

~/Downloads ~/Downloads/old ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Documents/Library ~/Dropbox ~/Pictures ~/Pictures/memes ~/Pictures/Inkscape ~/Pictures/Blender ~/Music ~/tools ~/Videos ~/Videos/Anime ~/Videos/Movies ~/Videos/Series ~/Videos/Tutorials ~/Workspaces ~/Workspaces/github/ ~/Workspaces// For keep in order:

- Music: I use https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ if the metadata isn't yet available then I left in downloads folder

- e-books: I use https://calibre-ebook.com/

- Videos: I use https://www.tinymediamanager.org/

- Projects: All my projects are GIT repositories

- Encrypted stuff: Plasma vault for folders and https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Downloads.html for disk

Sync folders between devices: rsync

Navigate between directories in terminal: ranger, z, oh-my-zsh, byobu

Compress files: tar and lrzip

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

#184

Post by ocdtrekkie »

qqn wrote: post #130

A very related question: I'm looking for a(n ideally FLOSS) e-reader that works on both Windows and Android so I can start building and cross-referencing my e-book/article (EPUB/PDF) library. I'm currently using Calibre but did play with Xodo before and liked both (Xodo has the nicer interface and allows for writing on pages with a stylus -- that's awesome). The killer feature I need is saving any highlighting/bookma…

Joyread has been build with annotations support built in. It's web-based, so platform independent.

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

#185

Post by csmeder »

I take the same approach a forest takes: optimizing for regular “forest fires” to clear out the old.

I start with the year: Eg. 2018

Then I break it into

- Projects

- photos

- personal

- etc...

Then each year I start a new folder Eg. 2019.

I only bring in Projects I’m still working on.

This method is not optomized for searching, but rather for destruction of what is no longer needed. I find this the best thing to optimize for.

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

#186

Post by egypturnash »

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. :-)

Chunking stuff into sets of ten is a good idea, memorizing the arbitrary numbers I’m not so sure about, but...

“An important restriction of the system is that you’re not allowed to create any folders inside a Johnny.Decimal folder.”

WHAT WHY

Like let’s say I’m using your example structure and I am working on a new marketing campaign. With a ton of moving parts to it - new logos to make, contracts to sign and save, websites to design, ads to put together, brochures to design and print, etc, etc. Potentially hundreds of files for each campaign. I just throw all this stuff into the same directory as all the other marketing campaigns? This sounds absolutely insane to me.

I guess alternatively I make a new JD folder - 30.04 Rumplestilskin campaign, 30.05 Butterscotch campaign, etc, but what happens once I’ve filled up the name space and have a new project?

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

#187

Post by GordonS »

h1d wrote: post #102
GordonS wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For media files like Music, I keep them on Windows desktop which gets synched to OneDrive 1TB account which came included with MS office subscription which I need anyway that is only $10/mo for both app and storage which sounds like a steal against other cloud storages.

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that I use OneDrive for an additional backup of photos - I have an MS Action Pack subscription, which gives me something like 5TB of storage (I forget exactly how much, but it's a lot!)

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

#188

Post by surajrmal »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #182
JohnBooty wrote: post #96

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…

I thought 'freceny' was a typo until I clicked the link, but sadly the man page doesn't really explain what it is. Could you maybe give a few examples of how you might find something eg. using find(1), and then how you could find it using z?

I assume it's a mashup of frequency and recency.

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

#189

Post by cilefen »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #182
JohnBooty wrote: post #96

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…

I thought 'freceny' was a typo until I clicked the link, but sadly the man page doesn't really explain what it is. Could you maybe give a few examples of how you might find something eg. using find(1), and then how you could find it using z?

z works a bit like a web browser does when autocompleting URLs from history rather than a file system search tool like find. z “learns” the file system paths as you traverse them in a terminal.

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

#190

Post by cilefen »

surajrmal wrote: post #188
mediocrejoker wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought 'freceny' was a typo until I clicked the link, but sadly the man page doesn't really explain what it is. Could you maybe give a few examples of how you might find something eg. using find(1), and then how you could find it using z?

I assume it's a mashup of frequency and recency.

Indeed it is: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places...
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