Do you keep everything in “downloads” or have file trees 100 folders deep?
Yes.
2tb external hard drive, and another 2tb drive that has a copy of everything.
If it’s important, or if you love your stuff, then always keep a backup.
I personally do three 5TB ext. drives, and only two drives may be at the same location at any given time. I’m also making sure only to use drives whose S.M.A.R.T. can be read without removing their enclosure.
Not sure who thought it’d be a good idea to make an external drive where S.M.A.R.T. cannot be read through whatever interface it uses.
I’m also making sure only to use drives whose S.M.A.R.T. can be read without removing their enclosure.
That’s a good call, which drives have you found that support this?
I haven’t found a definite favorite yet, but I’ve bought a few Western Digital external HDDs which have all supported S.M.A.R.T. over USB. I’m currently using their WDBU6Y0050BBK devices. They don’t have the best reviews, but mine have worked just fine over the past year.
Contrary, I’ve had two Seagate external HDDs in the past, none of which supported S.M.A.R.T. over USB, and they died after about 10 years of sparse use (powered on for backup at least once a year).
I guess one could find what USB chip the WDs use and then compare with other drives, but no one writes such stuff in their product information. >:(
My PC has a secondary HDD that has my files. Movies, books, comics, TV shows, random stuff, etc. It’s more or less organized in their own folders.
I have an organised Documents folder, Pictures folder, Videos folder etc synced between my devices with Syncthing. Downloads is just for temporary things I download from the web, but I never delete anything from there, so it just builds up. I keep a backup on an external 2TB SSD
Anything more than 5 dir deep is overly complex.
All movies are thrown into one folder called movies, every show is in its own folder with a season per folder. Jellyfin deals with that.
Music is stored by artist and thrown into the music folder.
Documents are sorted by year and purpose but are all in one folder called documents.
Books are in e-books, audiobooks are in audiobooks folders by author.I try but don’t always succeed. In my main laptop, I have all misc files in the downloads folder, photos in photos, documents(pdfs, writer, math) and videos/movies in videos.
on my main desktop it’s total anarchy
everything randomly distributed between
~/dl
and~/tmp
(i dont even remember why i have both), and then i uselr
to find stuff (alias lr='ls -lrth'
). orfind
.My organising system has a dual nature: it is either highly structured or a mess.
Information, such as documents, notes, spreadsheets, and images, is carefully organised into well-defined directories, no more than four or five levels deep. The destination directory is chosen at the time of download.
Anything that I expect to use more than once, even if only a few times, is dumped into a directory called GMS (Games, Movies, Software), which resides on a separate disk partition.
Everything else ends up in the Downloads directory, which is truncated every three months.
Sidebar on GMS directory
GMS originally stood for Games, Music, Software. But I stopped managing my own music since switching to Spotify and now Apple Music. I rarely watched movies on my computer back in 00s; my cable TV fulfilled those needs then.
I used to manage the contents of GMS few times a year, but I have stopped doing that now since my usage of this folder has dropped by a lot since the early 2010s.
The decreased use might be explained by my increased use of package managers, Steam and GOG, and streaming services.
However, another factor could be that I now avoid situations where I would need to download anything via my browser, unless absolutely necessary. Perhaps due to lower tolerance towards such practices or reduced patience with age.
Depends on what it is. Currently, on my laptop, I have music organized by group followed by album if I have ripped a CD for backup in case my CD stops working. Got a lot of blanks, just in case, for free.
Downloads isn’t organized. Pictures are slightly organized, with images for background in a folder and a few other folders. Most everything in documents is in a folder inside the documents folder or a subfolder in the subfolders.
Desktop has folder has mostly the important things in it, like folder for appimages, emulators, other programs and related files that require their own folder, and a few miscellaneous files. Organization is something I have prioritized a lot more on my laptop to ensure I don’t end up having a situation like with my desktop where it’s a shitshow.
As for phone, I’m doing a lot better with organization because I set up a new phone I got maybe a month or less ago and have been doing good to organize. Just need to go into my SD card and fix some things up that haven’t been organized for a long time, since my 2nd smartphone, back from ~2015-16. Mostly just music. Got over 500 audio files stored on an SD card, so you can imagine how insane it is to try and organize, especially if you feel daunted by that task like me.
Organizing is one thing but it’s better to reduce your brainpower-spending regardless of what you do.
On Windows? Custom iconed folders and explorer bookmarks go a long way. Better than relying on Quick Access or whatever.
On desktop Linux? Tools like
fd
andzoxide
(z
) save you as long as your directory names are consistent. Sticking tonames-like-this
reduces guesswork and you can skip around in seconds. (Saved me many a due date.)On Android, consult Indiana Jones. Your files are a treasure – they’re staying hidden
Android at least has this neat app named TagSpaces… but yeah I really hate how the entire filesystem is basically Windows’ “Documents” folder: Various apps just dump things wherever the heck they please!
Edit: Thanks for mentioning those really cool Linux tools!!
I used to have complete anarchy in my Downloads folder, but I’ve since reformed my ways and now my Downloads folder is clean and my Videos and Documents folders are complete anarchy instead.
NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I’ll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.
Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they’re organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.
It goes to the Desktop, when the Desktop is full I delete everything that looks unimportant 👍
thanks, I hate it
this is me, but i make another new folder and put everything in the new folder cause i don’t feel like looking to see if it could be important, i’ll do it later maybe
It’s a good way to do it.
More the latter, I organise mostly by type (movies, series, music, podcasts, comics, books, photos, images etc) and use (workfiles, documents, resources, tutorials etc). There’s was a whole subreddit about this, datacurator, not sure if something similar exists on Lemmy.
https://github.com/roboyoshi/datacurator-filetree
Basically doing a variant / slim version for my needs
I would advise against using dates in file/folder names for almost anything except for maybe photos and documents. Always pair with searchable keywords. Will you remember when exactly you downloaded that random picture when you wanna find it a few years later? Have fun looking through a hundred /year/month/day folders.
It’s a MESS right now.
My main computer has two partitions: Windows 10 LTSB and Windows 10 premium. I have to use Premium now due to NVidia’s drivers not working on LTSB for like… years. So I boot into my secondary, smaller partition. But I’m still installing games to my first partition. Also there’s some left over games from my LTSB install. I want to install LTSC IoT for longer support, but I’m lazy and all it does right now is play games.
So everything used to go to my 1TB HDD, but then I bought a second 4TB HDD, so now things go to that. And I back stuff up to my like, five 1-4GB external hard drives. Also there’s a Pi running OMV in the living room with a 5GH external, for media. That one’s kinda messed up right now, things are glitchy when I stream from it, so I need to reinstall everything.
Then my partner’s computer has a couple terabytes of SSD space and a single 4TB HDD. Much easier. P