Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

File Organization — How Do You Do It In 2011?

Posted by timothy on from the let-god-sort-'em-out dept.

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?"

1 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Directories by Anrego · · Score: 4, Informative

    .. seriously.. they still work for me.

    I’ve got a 12TB file server (~6TB filled). It’s arranged as follows:

    documents/
    incoming_downloads/ (before you ask.. yes.. _legit_ downloads)
    media/
    media/video/
    media/video/movies/
    media/video/tv_shows/
    media/video/tv_shows/some_tv_show/
    media/video/standup
    media/video/etc..
    media/music/
    media/images/
    media/images/various_subfolders/
    code/
    virtual_machines/
    tmp/
    backup_links/
    backups/

    That’s always been enough for me. Never got into all this tagging/meta data stuff. If there’s anything I’d ever want to search on... I put it in the file name. Indexed every night via slocate.

    backup_links is part of my hacked together backup system.

    The thing is raid6, setup so two drives can fail without loss of data. I see this as adequate “backup” for stuff that is replaceable (the large portion of my media is rips of DVDs I own... so although it would be a huge pain in the ass to re-rip them all... it’s not impossible). Stuff that is irreplaceable, I backup to separate hard drives (via hot swap trays).

    I leave one backup drive plugged into the machine, and keep the other elsewhere. I periodically swap these drives. I have a script that just rsyncs the files and directories pointed to in backup_links (the irreplaceable ones) to the currently plugged in drive (and yes I verified that I’m not getting a backup of my links ;p). This way I always have one drive that has a pretty recent backup (runs nightly), and one drive that has at most a month or so old backup if the plugged in one fails for some reason.

    backups is backed up files from other machines.

    Keeping everything in one place helps with the organization I think. Most of the other machines on this network are basically just OS installs. All the real files are on the file server. My desktop runs of a small SSD, which is not even half filled.