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File Organization — How Do You Do It In 2011?
siddesu writes "After 30 years of being around computers, I have, like everyone else, amassed a huge amount of files in huge amount of formats about a huge amount of topics. And it isn't only me — the family has now a ton of data that they want managed and easily accessible. Keeping all that information in order has always been a pain, but it has gone harder as the storage has increased and people and files and sizes have multiplied. What do you folks use to keep your odd terabyte of document, picture, video and code files organized — that is, relatively uniformly tagged, versioned, searchable and ultimately findable, without 50 duplicates over your 50 devices and without typing arcane commands in a terminal window? I found this discussion from 2003 and this tangentially relevant post from 2006. How have things changed for you in 2011? And how satisfied is your extended family with the solution you have unleashed upon them?"
I think you left a directory out. ;)
Fap and non-fap, and must-not-fap.
sticky labels on each floppy disk.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
I used to download stuff directly on my desktop (my habits have since then changed). One day, my desktop was completely full (meaning that there was no more iconspace, I know I could've just used an Explorer window but it was too much of a hassle), so I made a folder called "shit", and I dragged all of my stuff in there (most of the stuff was shit, so the folder was aptly named). It took a month or two to refill my desktop, then I made another folder called "more shit", and I again dragged everything on the desktop in, including the previous shit folder. When it was time to move my files to a new machine, all I had to move was about 10 documents in my Documents folder, my Music folder, and a folder called "megashit", which contained six nested levels of folders named after some variation of "shit", and with a total size of 200 gigabytes.
Applying the Infinite Monkey Theorem I put everything into one folder, assigning each file a pseudo-random name. Although there's only one of me, in time, I'm confident that a pattern will emerge...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I find these useful, but for family stuff I can't recommend a simple hard drive crash enough. They will suddenly know where copies of everything important is, and it'll come down to only a few gigabytes....