HD FILE ORGANIZATION

[6914708]

I would love to see some visuals and posts of some tricks and nice ways people keep all their files organized and clean. What are some good tips to make sure you dont have a bunch of extra crap living on your Hard Drive? How do you keep optimized?

 

[spercharged69]

I put movies in the movies folder, music in the music folder... 😀

 

[SilentPanda]

I just let OS X put them wherever they belong... iTunes keeps me music (in the Music folder), iMovie uses the Movie folder, Garageband uses the Music folder, iPhoto uses the photo folder, and I generally put iDVD stuff in the Movie folder also. Everything else goes in the Documents folder. You could create a directory for each App that you create things with in your documents folder... like a Documents\KeyNote directory, Documents\Pages, etc.

I just throw everything in the documents folder past the defaults.

 

[emw]

Sort of like SilentPanda except I break out my Documents folder by document category - Current Project, Presentations, Personnel, Customer Support - that type of thing.

Under each of those are more individual folders of folders of folders of documents. It makes sense to me 😉

Edit: Just realized you asked about keeping extra crap out. Well, the big things (movies, music, pictures) tend to be in folders that I can easily peruse to see if there are "extras." Other documents don't tend to take up a lot of space, so I don't worry about them. Every once in a while I'll do a find for large files and see if there are any I don't need, but I've never filled up more than about 75% of my HD, so I don't worry about it too much.

 

[SilentPanda]

Also once Spotlight comes out, most of this will be a non-issue so then you can just store stuff where ever.

 

[asif786]

generally, i like to let crap build up everywhere for a week or two, and then I have a big cleanup - putting the right things in the right folders and trashing what isn't needed.

I love this method - gives me a sense of achievement when I'm done 😀

 

[howard]

I'm fairly anal about where i put all my files. Everything goes into its designated folder..movies go into detailed set of folders... texts and and files that are from various programs...music editing..photoshop files..notation...spreadsheets...etc all go into there specific section and then get divided up into categories.

then in nearly every one of those proprietary file spots i have a sort of misc. folder if i don't know just yet where to put something.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I'm fairly anal about where i put all my files. Everything goes into its designated folder..movies go into detailed set of folders... texts and and files that are from various programs...music editing..photoshop files..notation...spreadsheets...etc all go into there specific section and then get divided up into categories.

then in nearly every one of those proprietary file spots i have a sort of misc. folder if i don't know just yet where to put something.

I'm similar to howard for every folder except the documents folder. That folder is a huge mess right now - I need to clean it up. All of my music is neatly organized by format and/or source. My movies are organized by format, then source. Pictures are organized by source, since I don't care too much about the format.

 

[ChrisFromCanada]

What are some good tips to make sure you dont have a bunch of extra crap living on your Hard Drive?

WhatSize is an excellent tool for this. It shows you in a very useful visual way what is eating your HD space. I use it all the time.

4.8/5.0 rating on versiontracker!

 

[Mechcozmo]

All documents go into a folder divided by classes and miscellaneous. There is also an archive there. Everything is so well organized I can find stuff going back to 4th grade which was a Power Macintosh 8100 or something. Whatever the kind was that was impossible to open up the box. That migrated to a PowerTower Pro 225 and then to an iMac and then to a PowerBook. All files intact and usable. 😀