
Ask HN: How do you organize data on your disk? - networked
Your projects, repositories, documents, media and other data files — what does the directory hierarchy that holds them look like? How did you come up with it?
======
zhte415
Corporate (banking) - across multiple departments and users - but I'd like to
share:

Bucket

|- filename1

|- filename2

|- filename3

|- filename4

|- filename5

|- ...

I'm not joking. This is because I worked in an organisation where directory
structures and silo'd access across each department were removed, and
everything got thrown into a pool of documents with files that needed to be
correctly names, and attached meta data filled out.

Most people hated it.

But I loved it, because it brought a discipline of accurate filenames and
attaching correct meta-data. It brought strong disciplines on
security/permissions. It brought an audit trail of who had opened or edited
what and when.

Whenever I see a department of a company with endless directory upon directory
of files with data replicated across them, I know the department has big
people trouble - stuff is being done manually and operational controls are
weak. Like seeing Excel sheets with merged cells = non-normalised tables that
cannot be pivot-tabled = staff don't know basic Excel functionality = stuff is
being done manually, time wasted, effort duplicated.

Everything was accessed by search. This also brought strong levels of
discovery: Formerly, a document in another department could have been useful
to me, but I'd not know of its existence unless I'd caught wind of someone
working on this problem before. Now, with correct permissioning, I would see
it through search. This saved incredible amounts of time. I also know that
what I wrote 10 years ago isn't stuck in a directory that no one knows exists,
it is at the fingertips of anyone who needs it.

------
kalzium
I'm really horrible at this. As neat as I keep my git repos, I'm a chaotic
keeping my disk organized. My desktop started to regularly get crowded with
files since I had a computer with an OS that made that possible. Still move
everything to "Stuff" whenever it gets too crowded and I don't want to make
the decision yet whether I should delete this particular file or not. At least
I have a "Code", "Git" and "Stuff" folder now.

------
jcoffland
My home directory looks something like this:

    
    
      bin/  - scripts I use
      build/  - software I build
      doc/
         biz/
           taxes/
             YYYY/
             ...
           budgets/
           receipts/
           house/
         travel/
         personal/
         notes/
         ...
      projects/
         projectA/
           docs/
             invoices/
             contracts/
             proposals/
             presentations/
             ...
           bin/
           src/
             repoA/
             ...
           archive/  - old data
           people/
             johndoe/  - sent to me by someone else
               YYYYMMDD/
               ...
             ...
         ...
         projectN/
      crap/   - Junk organized by date
         YYYYMMDD/
         ...

------
jhildings
I put most of the things i download on the desktop, and when it's to cluttered
i create a folder like "downloads2" and repeat until the "downloads3" is
needed ;D

~~~
_mgr
I started cleaning my act up after finding "shit to sort" inside a "shit to
sort" folder, which was nested under another "shit to sort" folder. I remember
also seeing another "shit to sort ACTUALLY THIS TIME!!!" folder within there
somewhere.

