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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?

#191

Post by egypturnash »

I am mostly an artist. I do both standalone images and large projects. This is what I've settled on over the years:

~/Documents/gfx/working/ holds pretty much everything.

~/Documents/gfx/working/ . this year. alias of the appropriate yearly folder, named to sort first in the Finder

~/Documents/gfx/working/ big project 1

~/Documents/gfx/working/ big project 2

~/Documents/gfx/working/ big project 3 aliases to big projects, space-prefixed to sure ahead of the yearly folders

~/Documents/gfx/working/2019/

~/Documents/gfx/working/2018/

~/Documents/gfx/working/2017/

...

~/Documents/gfx/working/1999/2000/ Yearly directories. Big project folders live inside the appropriate year.

~/Documents/gfx/working/old big project 1

~/Documents/gfx/working/old big project 2

~/Documents/gfx/working/old big project 3 aliases to big projects I don't want to keep at the top of the list

There's some really old stuff a level up in ~/Documents/gfx/ but it's a remnant of a time when I had different ideas about organization.

I keep ~/Documents/gfx/working/ in the Finder's favorites sidebar, along with the . this year . alias and the aliases for 3-4 current projects. Makes it easy to get to them them through both the Finder and file dialogs.

Big projects have their own file structures within their directories. Usually it's a bunch of Illustrator source files with Finder tags to tell me what's been finished and/or posted to Patreon, and subdirectories for things like web renders, reference files, book production, ads for the project, etc.

General reference/inspiration stuff either ends up in a directory outside of this - maybe in ~/Documents/ebooks/, maybe in something like ~/Pictures/reference/ or ~/Pictures/random inspirational/, there's no solid system. Reference stuff can also go in Evernote depending on how I figure I'll want it.

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

#192

Post by saghm »

mxuribe wrote: post #154
saghm wrote: post #9

I have a fairly specific system that I've developed, mostly due to my being fairly anal about not wanting to leave random files lying around after I'm done with them and wanting to keep as little as possible in my home directory. I tend to try to keep most things in my directory that's sync'd to cloud storage (previously Dropbox, now Nextcloud since Dropbox doesn't support non-ext4 on Linux); ~/Documents and ~/Pictur…

I am in the process of testing out transitioning from dropbox over to nextcloud. It has only been a couple of months, but so far, really working out great! Kudos to the devs/contributers of nextcloud!

Yes, I'm super impressed at how well it works! I haven't had to touch a single thing since I got it up and running

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

#193

Post by saghm »

haloux wrote: post #15
saghm wrote: post #9

I have a fairly specific system that I've developed, mostly due to my being fairly anal about not wanting to leave random files lying around after I'm done with them and wanting to keep as little as possible in my home directory. I tend to try to keep most things in my directory that's sync'd to cloud storage (previously Dropbox, now Nextcloud since Dropbox doesn't support non-ext4 on Linux); ~/Documents and ~/Pictur…

Which fs are you using nextcloud with? Is it as seamless as ext4 with Dropbox?

My personal laptop and desktop are on btrfs and my work laptop and desktop are still on extra; I haven't noticed any difference between how well it syncs between those sets of machines. In fact, after the initial setup of it on a Digital Ocean VPS (20 GB is enough for my uses), it's been virtually the exact same experience as Dropbox for me; the initial sync on each my my machines too roughly the same amount of time as the Dropbox sync did, and every change since then has been essentially instantaneous to my other devices. As an Arch user, it's actually easier to install than Dropbox (nextcloud-client is in the main repos, whereas Dropbox is only in the AUR), and the Android app has also worked perfectly for me. Assuming you're okay with a bit of upfront cost to get the server set up (I basically just followed the Arch wikis and then used Let's Encrypt for the TLS certificate) and the cost of a VPS, I'd highly recommend it for people who want filesystem sync'ing for non-ext4 on Linux.

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

#194

Post by mceachen »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #62
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #61

128gb personal Macbook Pro, which requires being somewhat creative. * Lightroom collection (library & photos) on Samsung T5 external drive * GoPro video collection also on Samsung T5 external drive * All sites, organized by domain name, in /Sites/ (Use DNSMasq + Apache vhosts to map the folder to sitename.mac domain locally) * Various github clones in ~/Clones/ * Nonsite code projects in ~/Projects * Google Drive fol…

Update: Synology does have what looks like a Google Photos replacement ( https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments ). Anybody who's used it care to share experience?

I tried it and my (albeit 2 year old) Synology ds416j didn't have the horsepower for the app.

Please forgive the self-plug, but if you have the time and inclination, I'd love to get your feedback by trying a beta build of PhotoStructure, which currently has ports for Mac, Linux, and Windows, but I've designed it to also be runnable on headless boxes, like on your NAS (I just haven't had the time to build installers and updaters for those platforms yet, and frankly I have no idea what the demand would be for those ports).

The signup is on the home page, https://photostructure.com/. Feel free to send me an email at hello (at) photostructure.com if you have any other questions.

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

#195

Post by adito »

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. :-)

Damn. This might works for my bookmarks folder. I have ton of bookmarks on Firefox and it becomes a disorganized mess. Definitely will try it and see how it goes. Thanks for sharing it.

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

#196

Post by MildlySerious »

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. :-)

How do you handle old files, if you don't mind me asking? My document directory has the year at the root level, i.e. ~/Documents/2018/billing/projectname which is nice in so far that you don't have to scan through files and folders that stopped being relevant.

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

#197

Post by distances »

dwd wrote: post #150
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/

This... https://xkcd.com/1360/ I once found some x86 assembly code I'd written decades ago and buried real deep (the folder names were in ALLCAPS and no more than 8 characters.

Pretty much what the xkcd says. I basically never delete files, they just get moved to deeper layers as time goes by. I roughly know where to find my elementary school presentations, first websites, university assignments and emails, rotated irclogs.. The mental map will take me there if curiosity awakens, better not to mess it up by organising.

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

#198

Post by faster »

fpgaminer wrote: post #164
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/

I'm in a similar boat, and I'll mention one "weird trick" that has helped me. What used to happen was I'd download, say, an Ubuntu image, use it, and then say "... I might need this again" and leave it there. Then a week goes by, I've forgotten its there. Sorting by Date Added its now piled under 10 other items. The empire of dirt grows... The trick? A Trash that automatically empties items older than 30 days. MacOS…

I use Classifier to manage file in my Ubuntu Downloads directory; it moves files into subdirectories by extension. I run it daily from cron, and my backup script runs it before backing up.

https://github.com/bhrigu123/classifier

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

#199

Post by rmk2 »

~/Downloads/source// for checked out sources of tools etc.

~/Downloads/programs for OS images, large binary blobs etc.

~/Development// for development projects

~/Documents/ for documents relating to specific projects or customers

~/Operations/ for various files related to servers and infrastructure (manual backups etc.)

/dev/shm as a dumping ground for temporary files that I would like to get rid of with a reboot

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

#200

Post by jason_slack »

zaphar wrote: post #133
jason_slack wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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 :-)

I called my version of this ~/sandbox.

Yeah I like this too. Perhaps I use playground/ for when I am in a good mood and sandbox/ when in a bad mood.
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