100% of everything is on the desktop. No borders no boundaries to divide the working class programs against themselves
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A NAS with organized folders. Everything else is on my desktop or downloads folder
Everything Everywhere All at Once
I have multiple folders of the form "desktop crap MM-DD-YY"
Your question made me curious, so I counted: the subdirectories in my home directory reach a maximum of 26 levels deep.
You gotta up those numbers!
or have file trees 100 folders deep?
I'm felling personally attacked.
Either that or folders that are too big to load.
When you are a Digital Hoarder like me, is both.
Ideally:
- Well-organized set of frequently-used and recent files on my laptop
- Media and old documents on my NAS, synced to an external hard drive I can remove for travel
- Each device/non-backup drive/USB drive/SD card backed up to its own folder on a large external drive
- A duplicate of said drive from another manufacturer
- An archival copy of my documents and photos (encrypted on microSD ofc) that I carry with me
- Additional copy of the most important stuff on M-Discs
Reality:
- Controlled mess on my laptop
- Dumping ground of random YT videos and CD rips on my NAS
- A well-curated external drive prepared in my pandemic free time
- An external drive with somewhat periodic backups of my devices alongside every unsorted file. I worry that some file paths have grown too long
- Duplicate of the two above on one large external drive
- Another external drive with files and backups of dubious usefulness that I refuse to delete
- An outdated copy of my documents and photos on an everyday carry microSD
- A stack of unused M-Discs
This is the one that hit home for me.
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
Organize?
It goes to the Desktop, when the Desktop is full I delete everything that looks unimportant 👍
It's a good way to do it.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
At this point, with the sheer amount of data, I've structured things based on individual drives. All of my devices have the onboard SSD. Call me old fashioned, but I still partition that one into two drives, one containing the Windows stuff and the essential 3rd party software, and a second partition which contains games, downloaded media, miscellaneous software, generally the stuff I use more frequently, but isn't vital. It's also where I store all downloads to keep the Windows partition clean and separate.
As for my external drives, I have one which I keep stuffed with game installs, and a second one which serves as my media library drive - music, movies, etc.
In terms of folder structures, I either use the default ones which come with Steam, for instance, or I keep it as simple as humanly possible (eg. Music > Artist > Album). Downloads are lumped in a single folder, wherein I may make subfolders for mass downloads of mods and such. Otherwise, Search & pray! With indexing turned off, because I like to hurt myself!
File trees 100 folders deep lol. I keep all stuff synced across my machines, no actual backup though...