I wanted to get people’s opinions on best practices for managing your files. I used to do a pretty good job at this but over the past year it has gotten out of control. I currently now have thousands of files in ~/Downloads and my ~/Documents folder has gone out of control as well. On ~/Desktop I have the three folders that are very well organized and I use this info the most (everything in ~/Documents is older stuff or stuff not related to work. For instance, in ~/Desktop, I have the folders: "SCHOOL" " WORK" "RESEARCH". Inside "RESEARCH", there are subfolders separated by research areas that I’m interested in and then I throw everything in there. The "SCHOOL" folder is separated by classes I teach and sometimes I have subfolders that say student papers, handouts, etc, other times, I just have no further subfolders inside "SCHOOL". For "WORK" I separate by the project name.
In ~/Documents there are various folders on different topics and they are decently organized. They could be better but I’m not going to bother. I’m also diff’ing my home directory to find duplicates and get rid of them to make things more manageable.
When I get a journal article, I try to rename following this format: Last, First name. Year. Title of Article. However, all the journal articles in ~/Downloads are not properly titled as I haven’t gotten to them yet (although with search, I do utilize the files.
I’m curious if I should just move all the PDFs from ~/Downloads into a folder and properly titled it and then move into the proper folder on ~/Desktop and for everything else I’ve collected over the years in ~/Downloads if I should just create an ARCHIVE folder with the date and leave it in there. I just don’t think I have the patience to go through all the files and really drill down what they and where they go. But it leads to the question, for the future, what do I do? And how often do I try to clean up the files inside ~/Downloads.
I’m really curious how other people manage their filesystems. I’m an academic researcher so I have thousands of journal articles (I’m looking into the app called Papers 3 to better manage these articles—I hope that helps), countless C/C++ and python files, various text docs, LaTeX docs etc. I don’t think it’s practical or necessary to drill down to subfields of what the research articles are, so long as they are searchable and titled properly.
Any other ideas? I’m hoping someone has a better system out there. Thanks!
PS: ~/Music is organized however iTunes organizes music when you import to an iTunes library. Same with Adobe Lightroom, my photos sit in its catalogue. As for TV and movies, that sits on my NAS and follows an auto file path (e.g., for movies NAME YEAR VIDEO-QUALITY AUDIO-QUALITY.$filename) that I set up as it gets added to the Plex library.
In ~/Documents there are various folders on different topics and they are decently organized. They could be better but I’m not going to bother. I’m also diff’ing my home directory to find duplicates and get rid of them to make things more manageable.
When I get a journal article, I try to rename following this format: Last, First name. Year. Title of Article. However, all the journal articles in ~/Downloads are not properly titled as I haven’t gotten to them yet (although with search, I do utilize the files.
I’m curious if I should just move all the PDFs from ~/Downloads into a folder and properly titled it and then move into the proper folder on ~/Desktop and for everything else I’ve collected over the years in ~/Downloads if I should just create an ARCHIVE folder with the date and leave it in there. I just don’t think I have the patience to go through all the files and really drill down what they and where they go. But it leads to the question, for the future, what do I do? And how often do I try to clean up the files inside ~/Downloads.
I’m really curious how other people manage their filesystems. I’m an academic researcher so I have thousands of journal articles (I’m looking into the app called Papers 3 to better manage these articles—I hope that helps), countless C/C++ and python files, various text docs, LaTeX docs etc. I don’t think it’s practical or necessary to drill down to subfields of what the research articles are, so long as they are searchable and titled properly.
Any other ideas? I’m hoping someone has a better system out there. Thanks!
PS: ~/Music is organized however iTunes organizes music when you import to an iTunes library. Same with Adobe Lightroom, my photos sit in its catalogue. As for TV and movies, that sits on my NAS and follows an auto file path (e.g., for movies NAME YEAR VIDEO-QUALITY AUDIO-QUALITY.$filename) that I set up as it gets added to the Plex library.
