Ask HN: How you manage files on your computer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How you manage files on your computer?

18 pointsdustinty13 comments

I am interested in knowing how you name, structure files and folders on your computer.

I'm pretty simple. I remember briefly experimenting with deep nested logical folder hierarchies in windows 98 when I was like 10 years old, no experiments became habits because I just didn't have that many files to store back then. NES roms and like 3 songs.

These days I have all my code in ~/code, a sub folder for each project. I've got apparently accumulated 120 project folders in the last 5 years. Anything else I make tends to be a loose file in ~/assets.

Whenever I get the urge to do some 3d modelling, I quickly check spotlight if I've started anything like it before. I get the urge to make a castle? cmd + space, type castle. Yup I last edited castleTown.blend in 2014. Then I just pick up where I left off.

My assets folder, being something I do to relax, has grown pretty ludicrous. It's distributed between a few devices, but i'd estimate I've got 2-5000 different made-from-scratch 3d models, digital paintings, textures, alpha maps, etc all over the place. Kinda wish I could have a garage sale from time to time :D

The only other kind of file accumulation goes in ~/Downloads, and I delete that wholesale every few weeks.

Thanks for making me reflect on my.. accretions..

I have a CG folder, in it there are modeling, painting, rigging, animation, fx, etc folders, based on the type of project.

If I want to render a complete scene, I'll put it in "props" or a "set" folder. In it there are folders by software type - hou, silo, ps; and also some for generated files - geo, cache, render, render_comp, and out (for final render).

Also there's CG/assets where I put textures, references, houdini assets, etc.

Got any tips on making rigging not feel unimaginably tedious? It's fun when you finally get a nice IK handled rig created, but getting there is always a nightmare for me. :(

Well, I use houdini, that's my solution =)

In hou it's really fun and flexible, and most of the repetitive stuff can be automated away. There's almost always a new cool challenge to solve, a creative improvement to be made.

Having said that, there's hardly a part of CG art that doesn't get tedious at times. Modeling, UVs, texturing, animation, rendering... It all has it's repetitive boring moments.

Look at it like at knitting, or putting together a giant puzzle, or playing minecraft. There are moments where you gotta think and be creative, and then there are moments where you can just enjoy the meditative, comforting, familiar process. It can be fun in it's own way.

Also, if things get really boring, you can always listen to music, audiobooks, or your favorite sitcom in the background =)

I may give houdini a try. I've only ever tried rigging in blender and zbrush. Blender is my package of choice for hard surface modelling, but the rigging workflow is just.. onerous. Zspheres are way easier, but I don't like the hard surface topology most of the time. Zspheres are also missing a lot of the advanced rigging features blender has. Usability has its tradeoffs I guess.

Thanks for the chat Rayalez! :)

I store most my files in ~/Documents. I have among other various folders a folder dedicated to code, to pdf books and to my school work as well as work. My code folder is separated by language and in each language folder I have a folder named bins which holds various one off experiments. Within each language folder I also have various long standing projects and such. My school work is separated by semester and then within those by course Identifier. My pdf books are separated by topic. Usually I tend to nest things in somewhat deep hierarchies. I can still quickly navigate by terminal because I use z.sh [1].

[1]: https://github.com/rupa/z/

I have files which only I have access to and files which are shared with small group of people and public internet files. `Private`, `Shared`, `Public`.

Files may be my own work or others work. I cannot allow to loos my files. `Created, Copy`.

Files may be text like small live with history demanded or large infrequently changed with no history needed. `Text, Binary`.

I can eat files in different forms. 'Audio, Image, Text, Interactive, Video`

I may maintain `Blob, Link` s.

I may have files which are `Encrypted, NotEncrypted`.

I may have files for different kinds of work or parts of my persona `Red, Black, White, Gray`

I may use files `Often, Seldom`

I may be source of files or consumer. `Read, Write`.

I could add more, but better to stop and count.

I am noob in math, but guess I may have:

3 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 2 * 4 * 2 * 2 = 1920 kinds of folders.

So my file organization is choosing on of 1920 options to name the folder and put files. Some times name is hierarchical. E.g. `/private/encrypted/`

%userprofile%/+workspace/projectName

%userprofile%/github.com

%userprofile%/Downloads - symlink to Desktop

../Desktop/+Archive - for old stuff

Everything older than 3 week gets moved automatically to +Archive to keep Desktop clean

%userprofile%/+workspace/ZimWiki/notes > with more tree structures

/work/jira/item.txt /work/releases/version.txt /work/deployment/sql /work/appraisal/20180208.txt /work/backup/sql /personal/events /win/backup /unix /web /edu /app/sql/data /app/data/sql /tec/sql/backup /journal/2018/02/21.txt /journal/2018/02/sqlBackup.txt ...

First create anything in a /Journal node on that /month, and later move to a more appropriate /node, after I understand where that is.

I can have multiple nodes to deal with same thing or similar. I can easily swap nodes parent with child.

I've pretty much given up on trying to find an all-encompassing hierarchical organization for things, on the grounds that I kept needing to make things that could go in one of several places and it was hard to choose which was the 'right' one. Now I instead just try to adhere to several principles:

1. Everything I want to keep for a long time lives in my home directory, so I don't lose it in machine migrations and OS reinstalls, separated (as best as I am able) from big stuff I don't need to keep (like installer images and stuff I could download again), simply so if I have to back it up to a space-constrained device it is easy to fit without needing a weeding out first.

2. I use the simplest file format I can, so for example a text file instead of a word processor document, for longevity. I still have old documents in obsolete word processor formats as a painful reminder of the cost of breaking this rule.

3. I rely on search (like find or spotlight) to find things. Accordingly, I try to use standard terminology and make sure my spelling is correct. It sucks to try to find something I know I wrote a few years ago, fail, and later discover my search failed because I originally misspelled the term I was searching for, or used an esoteric synonym.

4. Probably the most structured thing I have is my journal, which is just text files. For instance, today's journal entry is in ~/Documents/Journal/2018/2018-02-21.txt. The first line is today's date in ISO-8601 format, which means I can concatenate multiple entries and still be able to know which day any given line refers to. I have some awk and grep scripts that help with this.

Other than all that, I have lots of snippets stored in Yojimbo, and academic papers organized in Papers (Mekentosj). I have the iPad partners to both programs, and content synced to the iPad, one way (so the desktop is the definitive copy) because I've learned to not trust two-way sync.

Most of my files are in ~/projects, in folders by project name. Projects are structured according to conventions of the tech Im using. Most of the time it's project/server, project/client, project/<config-files>.

General advice is to try to keep it as "flat" as possible, deeply nested folders quickly become inconvenient.

I have an assets folder where I keep everything I may need organized by type - images, textures, references, screenshots, etc.

Then there's a temp folder for quick experiments and one-off scripts.

There's library folder where I keep my books, audiobooks, video courses(organized by subject).

And that's about it. Also there's a lot of the mess in Downloads folder, I let it remain unstructured, I just delete the most space-consuming files from time to time.

I track all my projects in ~/Documents/projects/[current|pending|completed]. Each project has its own folder and a <projectName.txt> summary file. As each project progresses, the projectName.txt file is updated and the folder receives other spreadsheets, text files, images, and copies of e-mails. Large projects that have subprojects have a "=" in front of their folder name so they're easily identified.

I split files between day-to-day work and/or personal documents in the /home/user directory, and a very large partition dedicated to long-term storage which is subdivided again into various media subdirectories and/or other archived files. Long-term storage is made up of things which have to be kept, but are not written on a daily basis - so that includes stuff like media, computer program archives, archived backups, etc.

Daily backups apart from /home/user include enough information to restore the system within an hour or so in case of a system crash: so /etc/, /usr/local, list of installed packages, website, mysql databases.

The total personal storage in /home/user usually varies around 10 gigs which is backed up daily as a single unit.

The total long-term storage is currently around 3 terabytes, this also is backed-up daily (to 2 backup disks) but using rsync so that only actual daily changes are copied.

When stuff needs a date, the date is done in reverse order using only 6 digits: YYMMDD. This sorts automatically by date.

The archive partition is called /a. It has these subdirectories:

audio_music audio_other BAK BAK_MONTHLY calibre comp git info jvs_docs_monthly mail_archive medical photo print travel VDI video xs

Each of these are subdivided further - examples:

/a/audio_music/bands/pink_floyd-dark_side_of_the_moon/dark_side_of_the_moon_03_time.flac

/a/calibre/fiction_collection/Dillinger/Jack Higgins - Dillinger (1350)/Jack Higgins - Dillinger - Dillinger.mobi

/a/comp/manuals/programming/ucsd-pascal-ii.0-user-manual-reconstruct.pdf

/a/comp/os/linux/pkgs/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.26-108824-ubuntu-trusty_amd64.deb

/a/photo/canon_2003/img_1235.jpg

/a/print/magazines/byte/1988-vol_13/198803_byte_magazine_march_1988.pdf

/a/travel/france-2011/europe2011-docs/travel/dubai_xfers_and_accommodation-nov11.pdf

/a/VDI/Windows7Laptop/win7-50gb.vdi

/a/video/doco/war/barbarossa1-politics_of_fear.flv

/a/video/music/vocal_male/elton_john-greatest_hits/216_elton_john-written_in_the_stars_ft.leann_rimes.mp4

/a/xs/aseries/A050_nse_080513/nse-30/Disks/qd/games8

I keep unused but "maybe be useful one day" code in a directory name "museum".

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