how do you organise your files?

newbee · 2012-06-08 20:57:31

so how do you organise your files?
any tips?
thx

Last edited by newbee (2012-06-18 20:34:46)

omns · 2012-06-08 22:33:57

Google (mail, calender etc) Dropbox and other cloud storage. Backup drives for graphics work and music.

Structure - everything grouped into folders and relevant sub-folders. Desktop is always icon free and occasionally has some files while working on a project. These are immediately filed when completed. Actually I often file them half-way through a project. I guess this is why I like CrunchBang. It forces me to get things organised into relevant folders from the get go smile

SlowMutant · 2012-06-08 23:42:15

It's funny because I had this discussion a while ago with a friend of mine....

I use the below. It's basicly a version of omn's brilliant

omns wrote:

everything grouped into folders and [...] sub-folders

wink

├── archive
├── backup
├── downloads (auto download for the browser)
├── dropbox
├── media
│   ├── movies
│   │   └── 1953_wages_of_fear_DVDrip_by_xyz
│   ├── music
│   │   └── Godspeed_You!_Black_Emperor
│   ├── other_audio
│   │   └── gibbson_neuromancer_audiobook
│   ├── other_video
│   │   └── Video_of_the_cat_2012-02-30.mkv
│   ├── series
│   │   └── McGyver_Season1-7
│   └── software
│       └── crunchbang_xyz.iso
├── projects
│   ├── photo_album
│   │   └── 2011
│   ├── rule_the_world
│   │   └── Stage 1 - How_to_get_them_to_adopt_my_dir_structure.pdf
│   └── wiki (for my Vimwiki)
└── stuff (it could be the desktop)

please don't ask me where I backup the archive or archive important backups...

concerning the movies: I like to order them by year. Need to know what came before one movie. it gives context because often movies cite or reference previous ones. But ... just personal preference.

It is basicly a matter of how to balance this tree. Let's say you have a lot of projects over a decade or so. You might group them further to avoid this one big projects directory.
There is no definitive solution. It depends on your usage of the tree.

Is 'media' even the right word for this kind of data ? Anyways, I needed it for the balancing.

Oh, and I don't like directories like 'documents'. My approach is more process oriented.
'documents' would be as if you would group your files by filetypes. In my tree I would create a project 'taxes' or 'taxes/2012'.

EDIT: I am realising that this post contains enough data to identify me. Hell, a simple dir structure... was this what you had in mind OP ?

Last edited by SlowMutant (2012-06-09 00:00:39)

gutterslob · 2012-06-09 00:02:29

SlowMutant wrote:

│ ├── music
│ │ └── Godspeed_You!_Black_Emperor

Quoted cos having this band in your music collection is essential!!

My layout's pretty standard.
bin, documents, downloads, git, images, music, source, tmp, videos.
Each contain various sub-folders, obviously.

Pics are divided into screenshots, wallpapers, misc and work.
Music is sorted via basic Artist - Album. My music player sorts them out based on tags.
Downloads folder acts as a sort of second tmp or temporary in many ways, since I often end up moving the files somewhere else. xdcc, torrent and ftp sub-folders.
Documents are; tax, work, misc, pdf, etc
backup is usually full of configs.

Last edited by gutterslob (2012-06-09 00:09:59)

SlowMutant · 2012-06-09 00:36:30

I have to say that my structure is from a second data partition.
bin, tmp are at ~/ since I dual boot win7.

off topic: gutterslob, I like your taste. I listened to this when I wrote the post.
It will definetly be what I will play at the end of 2012, just in case.

Awebb · 2012-06-09 07:41:55

I will not repeat what has been said three times now. Audio and Video are sorted, so XBMC's scrapper can add them without interaction. Fortunately, this is the way I used to sort files for years. See the XBMC wiki for naming guidelines. Pictures are boringly arranged in (sub){n} folders. eBooks are thrown into Calibre and while this is a nice tool, it is still far away from being an adequate document management system.

Documents. That's a hot one. The closest thing to peace and order is using Zim (at work at least), if you do it right, it will serve you as a multi-purpose knowledge database. You can append documents, if needed.

orionthehunter · 2012-06-09 11:27:32

I keep most of my important documents in Dropbox syncing across my different machines. My music and photos are all backed up on externals.

I keep a pretty shallow directory structure in Dropbox
Applications/Forms
Audio
Brainstorming
Finances
Games
Geneology
Graphics
Health
Lessons
Photos
Programming
Studies
Themes
Translations
Wallpapers
Web Design
Writing

finwin · 2012-06-09 11:43:43

Build
Downloads
Etc -> random files
Music -> Artist - Album
Pics -> wallpapers, reaction images, screenshots, gimp projects, pr0n big_smile
Projects -> python, C, ruby, etc
Texts -> mostly school stuff
Scripts
Videos -> anime, movies, series

Eren · 2012-06-09 11:50:28

Random, when I need to reinstall a Linux or format my laptop's hdd then I copy all to my external random too. lol But folders like this,

android -> roms etc
books -> lots of pdf books
documents -> i still don't know about this folder. it has everything on it. not specific files.
downloads -> yeah what I download
guitar -> tabs, videos etc.
images -> this one specific I think. only images, photos.
master -> my master documents, books, presentations, reports, articles etc
music -> just music
python -> handmade python scripts big_smile
scripts -> wm, de, conky related scripts
tmp -> mostly not coppied files into externals
videos -> porn etc lol

Last edited by Eren (2012-06-09 11:51:35)

Sector11 · 2012-06-10 00:22:48

Organization? What's that?

in /home

I have 63 of 82 visible directories dedicated to conky and that doesn't count 23 files as well.
You do not want to look in the directories ....

a maze - comes to mind.

dkeg · 2012-06-10 00:56:24

SlowMutant wrote:

It's funny because I had this discussion a while ago with a friend of mine....
I use the below. It's basicly a version of omn's brilliant
omns wrote:
everything grouped into folders and [...] sub-folders
├── archive
├── backup
├── downloads (auto download for the browser)
├── dropbox
├── media
│   ├── movies
│   │   └── 1953_wages_of_fear_DVDrip_by_xyz
│   ├── music
│   │   └── Godspeed_You!_Black_Emperor
│   ├── other_audio

^ +100 for GYBE. Wow now I know I'm in the right place !

sunfizz98 · 2012-06-10 05:08:42

I use XBMC's folder scraping structure.

Awebb · 2012-06-10 08:05:13

sunfizz98 wrote:

I use XBMC's folder scraping structure.

This is, by the way, the most sane media folder structure, even if you don't use XBMC.

oupsemma · 2012-06-10 09:34:40

By the way, Awebb, do you know the command that enables sorting alphabetically the contents of subfolders, folders within a directory?

I'm having so many places where my data are stored; I would like to have a clean view of what I've got...
Thanks in advance! smile

johnraff · 2012-06-11 16:01:09

...and the question of whether it's better to sort wide-and-shallow or narrow-and-deep?

Sector11 · 2012-06-11 16:30:52

johnraff wrote:

...and the question of whether it's better to sort wide-and-shallow or narrow-and-deep?

I like that:
wide and shallow
/home - ALL FILES

narrow-and-deep

/home
+ directory1 - file1
+ directory2 - file2
+ directory3 - file3
+ directory4 - file4
+ directory5 - file5
* etc

Or is that backwards?

Sector11 · 2012-06-11 16:31:54

Awebb wrote:

sunfizz98 wrote:
I use XBMC's folder scraping structure.
This is, by the way, the most sane media folder structure, even if you don't use XBMC.

Not just "media" but for anything .... it will take me years to sort out this mess.

Awebb · 2012-06-11 17:16:15

You sort your recipies by Artist/Album/Tracknumber - Title?

:-D

Sector11 · 2012-06-11 17:52:10

Awebb wrote:

You sort your recipies by Artist/Album/Tracknumber - Title?
:-D

Well no not quite but: Country/Catagory/Type/recipe - works and follows the same pattern above:

Recipies
 |
 |--Canadian (Artist)
 |  |
 |  Appetizers (Album)
 |  |-- Seafood (Track)
 |  |   |-- Surprise Spread (Title)
 |  |   |-- Shrimp Dip
 |  |   |-- Crab Cream Cheese
 |  |   |--
 |  |   |--
 |  |
 |  |-- Cheese
 |  |   |--
 |  |   |--
 |  |
 |  |-- Antipasto
 |  |   |--
 |  | etc etc

Why should I limit myself to: Artist/Album/Track # - Title

Awebb · 2012-06-11 18:02:28

No, you shouldn't, not at all. I just realized, that XBMC lacks a proper cooking show scraper. That's something to digest now.

Sector11 · 2012-06-11 18:24:44

Awebb wrote:

No, you shouldn't, not at all. I just realized, that XBMC lacks a proper cooking show scraper. That's something to digest now.

Excellent choice of words ... And there are a billion (OK I exaggerate) cooking shows on TV too!

mahatman2 · 2012-06-11 21:52:07

@slowmutant: Is your Dropbox folder lowercase? B/c I couldn't get my dropbox to do that ... could you show me how? [/offtopic, sorta]

But I organize my structure pretty default- backup, bin, documents, downloads, Dropbox, htdocs, images, music, etc. I'm most proud of my music organization. I spent about 6 hours (in spurts) renaming files & looking up stuff, but it's pretty awesome now and can be read straight off the file structure. It's like this:

music
-- artist
  |-- year.album
     |-- track.title
     |-- track.title

No file names have any spaces, and they're javaScriptCaps mostly - this makes it easy to tab the right stuff & all.

Other than that, Dropbox is the most organized - I have all my school stuff under UTC (the name of my school tongue ) and it's organized by semester, then class.

However, with all this stuff I think I need to reorganize! Good ideas, everyone. I really want a dotfiles folder in my ~ . With symlinks or whatever, right?! tongue (actually maybe Dropbox, to sync 'em) but yeah smile

Tunafish · 2012-06-11 22:26:58

dkeg wrote:

^ +100 for GYBE. Wow now I know I'm in the right place !

I prefer The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, but still... good taste!

I never think about organizing files. Now and then I lose some, while others are being backup up a 1000 times.

Edit: I lied: I do think about organizing files, but just thinking doesn't help.

Last edited by Tunafish (2012-06-11 22:41:33)

ArttuH5N1 · 2012-06-12 00:28:18

Big HD, /home-folders such as "music" directs to it.
(To clarify, folders inside my /home, such as "music".)

In that HD, I have folders for music, games, pictures, documents, videos (filmed with phone etc), movies, tv series, podcasts, downloads and for backups.

Music: Artist/title.mp3
Pictures: Device/date.jpg
Documents: A big mess. Mostly "Stuff from school/Class/file.rtf" and "Everything else."
Videos: Device/date.mp4
Movies, TV series and games by name.
Downloads is a mess, but cleaned regularly. A temporary store, really.
Backups by device_date.bu
Podcasts is the only one not managed by me. It is managed by my podcast-client instead. Even my music player isn't allowed to do that, because it would f*ck things up. (What is that Artist/Album/Title.mp3 madness! Albums, in this day and age!)

I have though about syncing to cloud, but I fear it would screw with my carefully managed order. Zer müst be order in mein file zystem!

Last edited by ArttuH5N1 (2012-06-12 00:29:09)

SlowMutant · 2012-06-14 15:03:05

@mahatman2: No It's Uppercase (wrote out of my head). here Awebb explains it smile

Tunafish wrote:

dkeg wrote:
^ +100 for GYBE. Wow now I know I'm in the right place !
I prefer The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, ...

I don't like the vocals. they sound weird and irritate me. And they give too much context and therefore makes this music almost always incompatible with my mood.

back on topic:

A friend of mine said that he stores all his documents in a dms. He even scans all the papers etc. Has anyone experience with systems like these ? (don't know which one he uses)

Awebb wrote:

Documents. That's a hot one. The closest thing to peace and order is using Zim (at work at least), if you do it right, it will serve you as a multi-purpose knowledge database. You can append documents, if needed.

For this kind of work Zim is too mouse and gui dependant to my taste. I prefer VimWiki (but it can only link to atachments, which is fine for me). But VimWiki is only an option if you know Vim already.

CrunchBang Linux

SEARCH

#1 2012-06-08 20:57:31

how do you organise your files?

#2 2012-06-08 22:33:57

Re: how do you organise your files?

#3 2012-06-08 23:42:15

Re: how do you organise your files?

#4 2012-06-09 00:02:29

Re: how do you organise your files?

#5 2012-06-09 00:36:30

Re: how do you organise your files?

#6 2012-06-09 07:41:55

Re: how do you organise your files?

#7 2012-06-09 11:27:32

Re: how do you organise your files?

#8 2012-06-09 11:43:43

Re: how do you organise your files?

#9 2012-06-09 11:50:28

Re: how do you organise your files?

#10 2012-06-10 00:22:48

Re: how do you organise your files?

#11 2012-06-10 00:56:24

Re: how do you organise your files?

#12 2012-06-10 05:08:42

Re: how do you organise your files?

#13 2012-06-10 08:05:13

Re: how do you organise your files?

#14 2012-06-10 09:34:40

Re: how do you organise your files?

#15 2012-06-11 16:01:09

Re: how do you organise your files?

#16 2012-06-11 16:30:52

Re: how do you organise your files?

#17 2012-06-11 16:31:54

Re: how do you organise your files?

#18 2012-06-11 17:16:15

Re: how do you organise your files?

#19 2012-06-11 17:52:10

Re: how do you organise your files?

#20 2012-06-11 18:02:28

Re: how do you organise your files?

#21 2012-06-11 18:24:44

Re: how do you organise your files?

#22 2012-06-11 21:52:07

Re: how do you organise your files?

#23 2012-06-11 22:26:58

Re: how do you organise your files?

#24 2012-06-12 00:28:18

Re: how do you organise your files?

#25 2012-06-14 15:03:05

Re: how do you organise your files?

Board footer