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Comment by jaquers | Hacker News Reader

Save files to my desktop. When it gets too messy, I throw everything in a folder called "Cleanup". Repeat. When it gets messy again, I rename the Cleanup folder to Cleanup_<date>, then throw that and everything else in a new folder called "Cleanup".

I'm about 7 deep at the moment.

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My approach is very similar, except the folder is called "Inception".

Sometimes I like to walk the Inception tree and reminisce.

I don't know when or how it became a tree, but over the years a few "Inception_", "Inception2", and "zzzInception"s managed to sneak in.

I was discussing browser tabs with others.

I usually middle click a bunch of articles on HN, then go read all the tabs until there are none left. I close by browser often.

But one of my friends, he keeps every tab forever. He always has everything at his fingertips, but a reboot or power loss is a crisis.

So I discovered talking to other that MANY do that too. hundreds of tabs is not as uncommon as you would imagine.

And so is this desktop piles-o-files pattern.

I wonder if the answer to all this is to adapt to human nature. Allow hundreds of browser tabs. Allow everything to be thrown on the Desktop.

and help people cope with the madness somehow.

(oh and the Desktop method is my method too, except periodically OLD and OLD/OLD and OLD/OLD2 get migrated from my SSD Desktop to my hard disk old-desktop)

Almost a decade ago I used to do this too. When the current browser window got too messy and I wanted to clean up I would just drag the window on the second screen and start a new browser on the primary screen.

Browser updates and accidental reboots (this was Linux and I accidentally typed “reboot” on the local machine instead of the remote server) were fun.

Nowadays I just don’t bother. If something is truly valuable or needs to be addressed I will bookmark it otherwise I let it go.

Many browser tabs are useful because Firefox allows for searching their titles using the address bar.

Similarly, keeping all emails in the Inbox starts looking useful once you have a nice to use filtering client.

I suppose holding a flat file structure will start making sense when a good filesystem-wide metadata search becomes available.

Sometimes I wish WinFS didn't die. That future could have meant the end of crappy ad-hoc directory structures.

My Windows desktop will routinely be using over 20GB of RAM with just Firefox with a few tabs, not even a dozen, Discord, and Teams running. It's boggling to me that people can run hundreds of tabs, even though I have definitely seen it. Watching them fumble around trying to find the right tab is also hilarious. It's like a roulette game.

Also, having many different browser windows spread out over 10+ desktops makes it even harder to find the right tab among those 100+

Can make my blood start boiling

This except instead of the desktop I just keep everything in the AutoRecover pane of Microsoft Office applications. My cleanup strategy: every so often when I'm feeling ballsy I say Yes when it asks me if I want to clear it out.

I realize this is almost as bad as the people who keep stuff in the recycle bin but I'm too busy to care. :-)

everything in my desktop and downloads dir is automatically deleted after 30 days. So either it's properly organized because it's needed long term or goes away.

Ohh, that's a good idea. I roughly do the same, but maybe the thought that something important might be lost would cause me to be more thoughtful about organization on the front end rather than sorting through it after the fact.

I have hard drives on shelves that are basically this. One thing I have been doing to reduce this is to have one folder that is for things like this and everything else is considered ephemeral. It sort of helps my to classify things as definitely don't want to lose (usually cloud to start so non issue) vs if I lost this it would be annoying, but not the end of the world.

I think in many ways I am a digital hoarder, files, bookmarks, HN up votes... the ephemeral strategy is so I have to actively decide if this is something that can't be lost, or if not, it must be ephemerally classified. These are my only two choices now

Sounds suspiciously like my /home/<user>/tmp/ directory.

Every few years, throw a wobbly and delete a few layers.

That's exactly it, I just use it as a visual working directory for pdfs, memes, text files w/ credentials, you know...

Yup, I have a similar (non-)system with a folder called "bucket". It gets filled up, named to <year+month>_bucket. I have a few years worth of buckets.

Occasionally I go through them and move relevant/valuable files into their respective category folders like "books". But, I try to do that while the bucket is fresh/small, since they are by nature a mess of information.

Almost the same, unless I don't put it on desktop but documents. From the algorithmic perspective, it's really efficient and it's like a linked list:

Read and write heavy on the head (Desktop/documents).

Keep the head lean from time to time.

Occasionally read from the tail, the efficiency is acceptable. It's like archeology, the more recent, the easier to reach.

People keep things they think they'll need and often end up not needing them. I do something similar and then blindly delete things because it must not be important if it's still in a "Misc" directory.

I have a simple batch script moving files to the necessary folder. Jpg,png,gif's will be gone to images (or docs/images) etc.

I see you have a very structured approach. I usually have to look for the stuff I need in Desktop\Stuff\Backup\oldStuff\old\

This makes me very uncomfortable :).

Only seven? Rookie. I probably have 15 to 20 folders that somewhat serve that purpose :P

Mood, right now.

I think this speaks for most of us...
https://xkcd.com/1360/

Sigh, I'm precluded from that - I've lost most of my old stuff to various HD failures and cdrom decay. I remember having a bunch of emails from my teenager years that became effectively unreadable when the proprietary client I used was abandoned (I realized too late). Sad times.

same.

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