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Comment by xmlninja | Hacker News Reader

Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.

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It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".

But don't do

  Stuff
  Junk

That's a rookie strategy, do

  Stuff /
  Stuff / Stuff
  Stuff / Stuff / Junk / ...

When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.

I've been telling myself I'll organise my now 4 layers nested stuff folders for 15 years.

A bit off-topic, but can anyone recommend tools to organise this much random stuff?

Not the answer you're looking for, I know, but I used to have 100+ labels/folders, 4-5 deep, and decade+ old emails, obsessively organized etc.

5 years ago, I dropped down to 20 labels, and started routinely deleting anything over 5 years old except for a specific "keep forever" label.

No regrets. No instances of searching for old items and not finding them, etc.

You should only organize things as you actually use them. The things you use are then generally organized and you haven’t wasted a bunch of time organizing stuff you never use.

If you do decide to organize a bunch of stuff you never use, that decision is then totally aesthetic, so you should choose a method of doing it that you find aesthetically pleasing.

Source: obsidian user who spent a bunch of time organizing stuff he never uses.

I largely agree, that's why I've still got all of it stored away, but I guess I'd like to keep track of what is it that I'm not using, what can I delete and what can I deduplicate.

I moved my old pc into a vm. The vm is the new folder.

I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".

I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!

I had to leave Windows 7 and start using Windows 11.

If only you could mount a separate home folder that stuck along while you changed roots. One can only dream..

I once had a mac laptop and figured out how to get macos running under proxmox.

I was able to boot macos in a VM and migrate my laptop. It "ascended" into virtuality.

You need to solve the migration strategy from stones and sticks to first desktop.

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