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Ask HN: Do you have a system for organizing your files?

8 points by x1798DE ↗ HN
An ocean of ink has been spilled about how to organize ones' notes and to-do lists and repositories, but I have not seen much in the way of a general scheme for how to organize the files on one's computer. I always end up re-inventing the wheel over time, so I end up having a bunch of places on my hard drive with different incarnations of the same folder (~/Documents/Pictures, ~/Pictures/images). I'm interested in whether people out there have a systematic way of organizing their files (bonus points if you've written up the reasons in detail somewhere).

3 comments

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Jugurtha
I've been using the same system for so many years and collecting things for so long, that I pretty much know where every file is.

  Technology
    Programming
      Meta
        (stuff about architecture, design patterns, etc)
      Python
      C
      JavaScript
      Scala
      Erlang
      Lisp
    Agriculture
    Automotive
    Building
      Architecture (books on colonial architecture, way to build, etc)
    Electronics
    Instrumentation & Control
      optimal control stuff, college stuff,
    Mechanical & Machines
    Signal Processing
    GSM
    Systems Engineering
    Design
    Food Tech
    Fluid Mechanics
    Aircraft & Aeronautics
  Core Knowledge
    MIR (books from "MIR Publishers")
    Mathematics
    Physics
  Documents
    Business
      Silicon Valley
        (books specific to sv: High output management, etc)
      Author1
        books by Author1
      etc
    Ideation
    History - Biography - Journals
    Democracy
    Language Learning
    Military
      Weapons
    Intelligence
      (intelligence analysis, etc)
    Cognitive Performance
      (cognition, meta-cognition, "How Learning Works", etc)

  Code lives here:

  workspace:
    musing (snippets I write, refactoring pieces of code, idioms, etc)
    python
      flask (flask repo)
      library_repo_etc
    scala
    c
    etc..
So, if you ask me about Flask's documentation, it's in Technology/Programming/Python and so on and so forth..
davidh92
I use a (slight) variation of the "Johnny Decimal" System (https://johnnydecimal.com). Essentially I have a folder called "library" with subfolders like this:

   - [1] Personal
   -- [11] Finances
   --- [11.01] 2017
   --- [11.02] 2018
   -- [12] Travel
   - [2] Work
   - [3] Education
   ...
[94.xx] is my special inbox folder which I use when I am to lazy to immediately sort something.

The website says that you should under no circumstances create subfolders within a [xx.yy] folder. I do break that rule - e. g. [31.04] refers to a specific course at university. Within that folder I have subfolders for specific assignments etc. The alternative would be either a (for me too) large amount of [xx.yy] folders or a messy course folder.

The big advantage of the system is that everything is identifiable by a simple number, which makes searching in spotlight really easy. E. g. searching for "[12." brings up all the folders for my trips in the last years.

I have been quite happy with the system over the last year or so and would recommend it.