By project, by tool? What do you do with pdfs and reference stuff, surely not Dewey Decimal?
Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#3My approach to file management is delegation:- Google
- Reddit
- Pocket
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Most files go straight to the default recommended location. This includes downloads, git repositories, programs, etc.
- Source code is on GitHub.
- Emails are on Gmail.
- Notes and todos are on Google Keep.
- Books are on Google Drive in PDF or EPUB format.
- Photos and videos are on Google Photos and YouTube.
- Music is on Spotify and YouTube.
- Movies are on Netflix, or in the Downloads folder (until they're watched and deleted).
- Documents and scans are on Google Drive. If I must name a file, I use this convention: "Some_Description-20190106.ext". I mostly rely on search, but I have some high-level folders as well: Books, Health, Finance, Travel, Work, School, Scans, Thoughts, Projects, AppData, Backups.
In 2019, I want to migrate from files to a database. My plan is to extract knowledge from files and online services, and them into a RDF triple store:
- Keep
- Maps
- Fit
- Contacts
- Gmail
- Calendar
- Hacker News
- Amazon
- eBay
- Mint
- Bitcoin
- MyFitnessPal
- Chrome
- GitHub
- 23andMe
- iCheckMovies
- GoodReads
- YouTube
- Spotify
- Netflix
- IMDB
- VoIP.ms
- Airbnb
- Uber
- Agoda
- Booking
- TripAdvisor
Lastly, I want to make a lot of this data public. I'll start by releasing the source code of old/ongoing projects on GitHub and release my ideas/thoughts on my blog.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#4I keep all my very current projects on the desktop along with temporary items and odd-balls I haven't classified. Everything else goes into folder called "A Reference System" which contains a folder for each letter of the alphabet.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#5My approach to file management is delegation: - Most files go straight to the default recommended location. This includes downloads, git repositories, programs, etc. - Source code is on GitHub. - Emails are on Gmail. - Notes and todos are on Google Keep. - Books are on Google Drive in PDF or EPUB format. - Photos and videos are on Google Photos and YouTube. - Music is on Spotify and YouTube. - Movies are on Netflix,…
I do like the idea that "Most files go straight to the default suggested path".
Maybe the rest is a little Google-centric for me. Perhaps that's why I'm having trouble being organised; I haven't bought 100% into any ecosystem.
Do you not keep source code locally? Or is it in two places?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#6I keep all my very current projects on the desktop along with temporary items and odd-balls I haven't classified. Everything else goes into folder called "A Reference System" which contains a folder for each letter of the alphabet.
Wow. But then the question is - what word does the letter represent: is it a topic, a project, the name of the tool ... ?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#7My approach to file management is delegation: - Most files go straight to the default recommended location. This includes downloads, git repositories, programs, etc. - Source code is on GitHub. - Emails are on Gmail. - Notes and todos are on Google Keep. - Books are on Google Drive in PDF or EPUB format. - Photos and videos are on Google Photos and YouTube. - Music is on Spotify and YouTube. - Movies are on Netflix,…
Since you seem to store everything on various Google services, what is your backup strategy in case you loose access to your account?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#8I'm on a Mac. On my main hard drive:
Applications go into /Applications, unless they're games, in which case they go in ~/Games.
Downloads stay in ~/Downloads unless I have a reason to put them elsewhere. I also clear the Downloads folder whenever I'm running out of hard drive space.
Pages documents and similar go in ~/Documents.
The Desktop is my temporary workspace, for active projects.
I have a script that automatically downloads podcasts and Youtube Videos every evening. These go in either ~/Movies or ~/Music depending on whether they are audio or video.
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Now, I also have a separate mirrored ZFS pool I consider my "Archive". This drive is meticulously organized to a semi-ridiculous degree I can't fully describe here, but here's an overview of the top level structure:
• Books: A collection of audiobooks, organized by series.
• Games: Video games, organized by franchise. All either DRM Free, or with patches included to remove online-activation requirements. Also roms of console games, for use with flash cards or emulators. I don't separate games by platform, because if I want to play a specific game, I'll move to the platform that game is compatible with, and not the other way around.
• Movies: Contains BluRay rips and decrypted iTunes purchases of both movies and TV shows, organized by franchise and/or season.
• Music: My (sadly small) music collection, all thrown into one folder because there aren't that many songs. I keep meaning to buy more...
• Personal: This contains my birth certificate, schoolwork, past job applications, health records, social media profile data exports, photographs, etc.
• Software: All software I've purchased or written myself, and free programs I want to remember to use again. Organized by platform (macOS X, Windows, DOS, etc.) with a separate folder titled "Multi-Platform" for anything compatible with multiple OS's. This unfortunately means that if I need to retrieve a Mac program I need to check both the Mac and Multi-Platform folders in order to find it, but I can't think of a better system.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#9I 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 ~/Pictures are both symlinks into that folder so that I don't have to keep track of which machine something is on. I try to keep my ~/Downloads directory fairly clean, and move things to the trash liberally (through trashcli) once my initial use is finished so that I can still access them later if I need to. The only other two (non-hidden) directories I keep in my home directory are ~/dotfiles (which is a private GitHub repo that I symlink my dotfiles from) and ~/code, which has subdirectories for various categories (`forks`, `scripts`, `projects`, `scratch`, and maybe a few others I'm forgetting). Finally, I have a ~/.scratch directory where I put text files I use to take notes, short scripts I write to test something, and other files I only need for a short time.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?
#10I keep all my very current projects on the desktop along with temporary items and odd-balls I haven't classified. Everything else goes into folder called "A Reference System" which contains a folder for each letter of the alphabet.
> Everything else goes into folder called "A Reference System" which contains a folder for each letter of the alphabet.
Wouldn't it be easier to just keep the directory structure flat, and use software to jump between letters? For instance, on macOS I can just press the "C" key and Finder will jump to items that start with C.