How do you organize your digital stuff?

I used to have complete anarchy in my Downloads folder, but I've since reformed my ways and now my Downloads folder is clean and my Videos and Documents folders are complete anarchy instead.

Organizing is one thing but it's better to reduce your brainpower-spending regardless of what you do.

On Windows? Custom iconed folders and explorer bookmarks go a long way. Better than relying on Quick Access or whatever.

On desktop Linux? Tools like fd and zoxide (z) save you as long as your directory names are consistent. Sticking to names-like-this reduces guesswork and you can skip around in seconds. (Saved me many a due date.)

On Android, consult Indiana Jones. Your files are a treasure -- they're staying hidden

100% of everything is on the desktop. No borders no boundaries to divide the working class programs against themselves

These days, a shallow folder system. I have an electronica folder, and a Blanck Mass folder that definitely would go in there but that is full enough to stand on it's own. Actual taxonomic organisation would take way too many clicks, but flat organisation can result in trouble finding things, and just looks like you're a slob. (Although I'm guilty of having unsorted hoarder folders for things I only needed once, too)

There's probably a rule of thumb for optimal fanout on each GUI folder, related to our visual processing. Hmm. I wonder if there's a way to make the tree self-balancing as well.

It goes to the Desktop, when the Desktop is full I delete everything that looks unimportant 👍

I use this thing, I find it pretty useful

I try but don't always succeed. In my main laptop, I have all misc files in the downloads folder, photos in photos, documents(pdfs, writer, math) and videos/movies in videos.

I don't keep anything relevant on my machine. It's just a way to access data hosted somewhere more safe. Also files and folders are terrible ways to organize anything, even remotely like Google Drive or similar stuff. It's Microsoft's and Apple's brainrot outliving the 90s. We should move forward.

Your question made me curious, so I counted: the subdirectories in my home directory reach a maximum of 26 levels deep.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

I just use Everything desktop search and let the files fall where they may.

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

I use plex so it files have to complay with the minimum plex naming conventions:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/

I’ve struggled with digital organizing for decades. I tried tons of strategies from other people. There’s lots of good ideas, but ultimately you have to find something that works for you. I take some ideas from other systems and tweak them in ways that make sense for me.

I heavily rely on the default indexing of my OS. KDE is great, but most OSes have pretty good file searching tools. Just make sure to label files or at least folders in ways that are searchable.

Backups are super important (3 copies, 2 different types of media, 1 copy off site). I like to structure my data in a way that is easy to back up. I have a folder called “ephemeral” for stuff that I don’t care to back up so I don’t waste precious space. But i also try to have way more space than i need. I have a 4TB ssd on my main laptop and am planning on upgrading to 8TB soon. I have two different ZFS RAID3 arrays on my server where I copy data too. I started using syncthing to keep different types of media backed up between multiple computers. That way I can decide which computer is connected to which data set. Then I take regular backups of the sever to external drives and rotate those backup off site monthly.

I like to have a folder called “archive” where i put things that I want to hold on to, but will probably never need regular access too.

I also have a sensitive data folder for things that need to be on encrypted drives like financial statements, social security, passwords, ssh keys. Keeping it together helps me from forgetting it on an unencrypted drive. I had a laptop stolen once and it sucked not knowing what they may have pulled from it.

I have a media folder that contains folders for basic file types like documents, pictures, books, music, etc. The ephemeral folder has the same folder structure, but contains files that i don’t care if they disappear or get deleted. It is annoying to keep up with this though. But investing in storage space buys me time to not deal with it.

It will never be perfect so I learned how to stop worrying and love the search.

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.

2tb external hard drive, and another 2tb drive that has a copy of everything.

Yes.

Downloads folder is a free-for-all; things get properly sorted when they’re moved onto the NAS - there is a seperate network drive for Multimedia (videos), Applications, Photos, etc. Each of those are then usually nested by Alphabetical folder.

Depends on what it is. Currently, on my laptop, I have music organized by group followed by album if I have ripped a CD for backup in case my CD stops working. Got a lot of blanks, just in case, for free.

Downloads isn't organized. Pictures are slightly organized, with images for background in a folder and a few other folders. Most everything in documents is in a folder inside the documents folder or a subfolder in the subfolders.

Desktop has folder has mostly the important things in it, like folder for appimages, emulators, other programs and related files that require their own folder, and a few miscellaneous files. Organization is something I have prioritized a lot more on my laptop to ensure I don't end up having a situation like with my desktop where it's a shitshow.

As for phone, I'm doing a lot better with organization because I set up a new phone I got maybe a month or less ago and have been doing good to organize. Just need to go into my SD card and fix some things up that haven't been organized for a long time, since my 2nd smartphone, back from ~2015-16. Mostly just music. Got over 500 audio files stored on an SD card, so you can imagine how insane it is to try and organize, especially if you feel daunted by that task like me.

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.

A NAS with organized folders. Everything else is on my desktop or downloads folder

Organize?

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

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 but entirely in Downloads of course

Well whenever I want to keep track of an important document, I put AAA or 000 in front of the title. And then I make several copies. And then I make multiple folders intending to organize things. And then I wind up with 30 separate docs folders yet all my documents end up in the general My Documents, Downloads, or Desktop folders instead.

• downloads clear themselves out after 30 days
• documents has all my projects and shit
• pictures/videos has my processed stuff
• larger (slower) hard drive has my raw video and photos
• desktop has nothing, I haven’t used desktop icons in 10 years

everything randomly distributed between ~/dl and ~/tmp (i dont even remember why i have both), and then i use lr to find stuff (alias lr='ls -lrth'). or find.

or have file trees 100 folders deep?

I'm felling personally attacked.

I have multiple folders of the form "desktop crap MM-DD-YY"

My organising system has a dual nature: it is either highly structured or a mess.

Information, such as documents, notes, spreadsheets, and images, is carefully organised into well-defined directories, no more than four or five levels deep. The destination directory is chosen at the time of download.

Anything that I expect to use more than once, even if only a few times, is dumped into a directory called GMS (Games, Movies, Software), which resides on a separate disk partition.

Everything else ends up in the Downloads directory, which is truncated every three months.

Omg now they're trying to profile where you keep your shit so their hackers can find your porn stash more efficiently. Don't tell them Pike!

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

File trees 100 folders deep lol. I keep all stuff synced across my machines, no actual backup though...

D: Downloads

Then the folders -

Films

TV programs

Software

• Everything inside these folders is a fucking car crash

Anything more than 5 dir deep is overly complex.

All movies are thrown into one folder called movies, every show is in its own folder with a season per folder. Jellyfin deals with that.
Music is stored by artist and thrown into the music folder.
Documents are sorted by year and purpose but are all in one folder called documents.
Books are in e-books, audiobooks are in audiobooks folders by author.

I don't have the energy or the patience so the *arr stack organizes everything for me automatically. Not 100 levels deep, maybe a dozen or so at most, but very clean and tidy.

I sort things every once in a while but eventually lose interest or patience. Would be nice to have a way to do it automatically. I suppose llms could help there, but I'm not sure if they're quite there yet in terms of reliability.

I have mine set up in groups, per hard drive.

Documents is set up for projects. Downloads gets grouped every few months and turned into a backup downloads folder on the backup hard drive.

So it goes from C:/Downloads into H:/Backups/Downloads/Downloads-11-19-2024

Every other hard drive is mostly just games, so it's set up by project and the Games with whichever launcher.

I don't have many projects that go more than 6 folders deep, most would be 4 at most

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.

I've gone super organized to absolute dumped folders over the last decade. If you have a NAS, get organized. Everything on your computer, do more loosely.

My rule with hobbies like electronics like PCB design prototyping and breadboarding, 3d printing, roadie bicycle stuff, etc., is that my collection of crap and organization scheme has failed when I forget what I have or can't find it when I need it. I avoid the rabbit hole of making organization a priority project or taking it too far by only targeting what I need to do in order to prevent these situations of missing items.

The same goes for digital storage. My organization must be intuitive so that a year or more from now, I know where to find the thing at a glance.

One trick I learned from managing multiple connected point of sale systems for a chain of retail stores is to name your files in a way that sorts naturally. For instance, use year-month-day in file naming as opposed to nonsensical date standards. With bikes in the bike shops it was

• "Bike-
• MTB/RDR/TRI/HYB/KID-
• XS/SM/MD/LG/XL
• (Brand)-
• (Model)-
• (Year)"

Without a sales staff performing any searches I wanted bike types and sizes to naturally sort. I needed them to see exactly what was in stock in their store without thinking about the computer. I wanted them to immediately identify the range of choices available so that they could easily tell the customer what choices they have for immediate gratification. This involved me normalizing bike sizing to fit within my naming constraints as no bikes are sized the same way across brands. This is still how I think about naming schemes, they should always have sorting functionality built in. But don't take it so far that you can't remember the way you organized stuff without refamiliarizing yourself with the details.