Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

Sometimes I have a file in the project's top level directory explaining what the subdirectories are.

Or if I have five or six scripts which accrete over time with data going in one end and coming out the other end, I write a file explaining how I do it, before my shell history disappears and I forget.

I go with Ubuntu's default Music, Videos and Downloads. The other high-level directories are a development directory, a work directory, a personal projects directory, a personal directory, a development scratchpad directory, a things-to-do directory, and an old accumulated junk directory.

The development directory has some binary packages, git repositories, development journal notes (not on my blog), as well as some notes on aspects of languages and frameworks.

The development scratchpad directory has subdirectories by date. Mostly for code I am writing.

My work directory has all work information.

My personal projects directory has tax info for my S-corp, bank information, as well as information on personal side business projects and code.

My personal directory has my resume, contact info for friends and family as well as pictures of them, personal tax info, and this sort of thing.

I also try to name directories, and sometimes files, so I can find them with locate.

My work computer has all of our repos under the \git folder

For repos that I have started it is

\git\{project} - contains all of the CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CloudFormation related files as well as Word and markdown docs

\git\{project}\src\{language} one project can have a combination of languages and each are built differently

\git\{project}\sql\ - usually there are some one off scripts that we need to run related to a project.

As I said above my personal computer doesn’t get used as anything too much besides as a Plex server and all of my movies and TV shows are stored in the Plex recommended structure.

Photos - I don’t have that many in the grand scheme of things but they are all in Google Photos and are automatically tagged and organized by date and location. I guess I should sync them to my computer to be backed up by Blackblaze.

Random Notes - in the Notes iOS app organized by subject.

Technical Ebooks in PDF format - Google Drive folder and shared with friends.

Personal documents in PDF format - in iBooks backed up to iCloud.

Resumes and a few other Word docs - in OneDrive.

If either my computer, phone, or iPad got destroyed, I wouldn’t be too inconvenienced. The most inconvenient part would be waiting for BlackBlaze to ship a hard drive with all of my media.

- .{$name}

  - {$name} Administrative = my personal corporate footprint.  W-2s, onboarding, perf reviews, etc

  - {name} Projects

    - PMO Projects

    - Leadership Projects

    - Team Projects = internal initiatives

    - Administrative Projects = stuff like, we need to update our service catalog portfolio or create a new RACI

    - Application Projects = stuff like, “migrate the Fruitbasket database’s nonclustered indexes and staging tables to new filegroups”.  Small technical projects, surfaced by our team

  - {$name} Troubleshooting

    - YYYYMMDD-$app-problem-desc = all the documents and data for a specific issue.  Log dumps, AARs, executive summaries

  - {$name} Management

    - Vendors

    - Budgeting + Forecasting

    - Expenses

    - Technical Portfolio

    - Team Members

    - SLAs / OLAs

    - Audits

    - Onboarding

  - {$name} Documentation

  - {$name} Forms and Templates

  - {$name} Meetings = all meeting agendas and write ups.  Each is a txt file named as YYYYMMDD-stakeholder/app-topic.  Can be a tossup whether a meeting write up goes here or in a project folder.

  - {$name} Change Management = docs and data for each change I’m either submitting or implementing.  Each sub folder named by the Servicenow ID and a description.

  - {$name} Operations = heat maps, log dumps, baselines, WIP documentation.  Much of this is getting moved to github.