I tried to use Finder's tags but failed to keep things organized everytime. Are you using a specific app? Do you have some "tips" to keep a setup clean?
Spotlight doesn't work great for me. I have a large number of e-books and documents in my home directory and Spotlight is likely to return the most recently added books even if they are completely irrelevant to the search terms.
Results are a little better, sometimes, if I search specifically in a given folder and especially if the terms are in the filename. But it really should work globally.
I use MacOS directories as well. The top level directory is the year. The next level down is the major category, i.e. personal, business, church, etc. The next level down is the specific project under that category. I also add the date, in the form yearmonthday (20190307 for example) to the files which keeps them sorted in date order.
Having some more context would be nice, but here's some tips as a web developer.
* Don't save files on the desktop.
* Create a Projects or Dev folder in your home directory and make a folder for each project. (For Web development, I use Laravel Valet which automatically makes a foldername.test vhost inside ~/Dev.)
* My Downloads folder is very messy. I could probably set up a job to delete files older than 6 months, but I have plenty of space, so no need (yet).
For managing folders that collect cruft, or for doing things like deleting screenshots from the desktop after some period of time, I use Hazel. It’s great for menial maintenance tasks.
I've been using ~/src/HOST/ACCOUNT/REPO pattern for all source code since playing with go... host could be github.com or GROUP.visualstudio.com .. account can be an account/group/project name and repo is the individual code repo. Local temp things ~/src/local/PROJECT/REPO
I have also taken to a few setup scripts that ensure tooling is installed, and checks out the repos in their respective directories.
Cons: It's a global namespace and easily cluttered, and the clutter is visible as the default background of your display.
It's like "saving things" on my physical desk - a bad habit I tell myself not to do, but still find myself doing. (chucks a few things that have been on my desk).
> It's like "saving things" on my physical desk - a bad habit I tell myself not to do, but still find myself doing. (chucks a few things that have been on my desk).
But on a physical desk I don't have options to sort, search etc. I do on the mac. I use the desktop as place for non-critical files everytime (like a screenshot that I have to attach to an email, or to export a image without background that I am going to use on a ppt). Basically just as a temp folder.
It is absolutly cluttered, but the ability to drop a temporary file there without thinking of structure or what it relates to trumps the clutter it creates.
Another vote for Hazel. I also use Yoink, which is sort of a drag-drop shelf for files that you're trying to move from one place to another. Drag them to the Yoink shelf, go do some other stuff, then drag them off of the Yoink shelf to their destination. For screenshots and images I'm saving on the web, I no longer even allow them to save to the desktop. I perform the screenshot (or drag from browser), drag it from the new Mojave preview widget to Yoink, then drag them to the destination. They're never saved in Downloads or on my Desktop.
I do all document management with an app called DEVONthink. I’ve been working with digital paper apps for years, and DEVONthink absolutely crushes everything else. I put everything in it, and I sync it between devices using WebDAV via Seafile, which also works to get data offsite in case the house burns down. It’ll do encrypted databases, and it has mobile apps that work great. I scan documents directly into it, tag them, and sometimes link them from multiple folders, which Devon will do without copying them (or I can also copy them if I need to). It has fuzzy search capabilities and automatic OCR that is lightning fast. It’s one of a handful of apps that are always open on my desktop.
Documents aren’t stuffed into some database, either. They’re indexed and stored in a folder hierarchy that you can still access. This makes it easy to search and find them with tools like Alfred or Quicksilver or Spotlight. You can open them directly using apps like Word, and Devon doesn’t care. Devon also has an inbox you can use with Finder, so when you drop a file into the folder, it automatically moves to an Inbox folder in Devon for you to process and move to a final destination within the app.
I never got the hang of Devonthink and couldn’t get into the habit of using it for all (or even most) files. How did you get started with it and what resources, if any, did you use? Do you always only index files (while they remain in whatever folders you have left them) or do you also import (copy into it) too?
I went through their whole tutorial video section on the site, and a complementary section on how other people use Devon (author, lawyer, some other types). It took me a couple of nights of watching videos before bed to get my head around it.
Then I created some folders for large groups, like "Documents" at home or "Projects" for work, and broke it down from there. I don't have more than maybe 4 levels under anything, except where there are year/month breakdowns.
AFAIK Devon doesn't work outside of its own folder/database. It doesn't index everything in my ~ for example. I create stuff in Devon or drag stuff into it from outside, holding down CMD so that it moves instead of copies.
Within Devon I'll sometimes need something in two places (all receipts and tax-deductible receipts, for example), so I'll use Devon's "replicate" function to make a pointer to the same doc. For work stuff, I have templates (release_plan.md) that I'll "duplicate" to a new project. As long as they're the same, Devon has an icon that says so, but as soon as I edit one, they diverge into independent docs.
Just curious, what kind of documents you keep in there? I have thought about it and even have a scanner but the truth is I don't seem to have anything that's actually worth saving? I have maybe 20 documents that I actually need to keep and at that scale a simple folder full of PDFs works just fine.
Everything. I have databases for home and work. In the home database I have top-level folders for me and my wife (for personal stuff we each might store), documents, invoices and receipts. The Documents folder has all sorts of delineation - banking, animals (pet passports, vaccination history, etc), businesses, insurance, investing, legal, medical, peoperty, radio (N1GMA), taxes, vehicles, vendors, etc. I scan everything. Contracts, receipts for things I might want to return, receipts for tax deductions or expenses, manuals (usually a PDF download), bank statements, property documents, spreadsheets related to home projects, literally everything that exists on a piece of paper that might be valuable in the future. I'm from the US, live in Chile, and have residency in Chile and Panama. There are a lot of legal docs related to those processes that go into Devon. I own a business in Panama, so everything related to that is also stored in Devon. I travel, so if I'm in the US and need a document related to something from another country, I know that it's on my laptop or accessible from my phone via the sync.
I also use Devon to rip web pages, either to save as a bookmark or as a one-page PDF, so when I find something useful for work or around any idea that interests me, I'll put it in Devon instead of a Chrome/Firefox/Safari bookmark. I never remember what's in the URL of a bookmark to search for it, but I do remember the content. I can search in Devon, find the PDF, and if necessary, click the link to go back to the webpage.
I write content for part of my job, so I'll use Devon for brainstorming or outlines, all in Markdown. I've written a little snippet for Keyboard Maestro so the Cmd-N in Devon asks me what type of document I want to create (markdown, plain text, or rich text), and then it creates that in the folder. If I'm doing basic stuff, like taking notes for a meeting, I just work in raw markdown, but if I'm actually formatting something like a blog post, I'll click the "Open Externally" button to open it in Macdown. I'll make action items and after the meeting transfer them to Taskwarrior for execution. I don't need to remember what happened in every meeting - I just need to remember to read the notes.
I'll collect images for blog posts and store the whole thing in a subfolder under Projects/Content/Blog/{article-slug} so that everything is nicely organized. I use the Search function for those "I know I saved something about {foo} a few weeks ago" moments. Otherwise, I jump right to the project I'm working on and am confident that everything related to it is within that folder.
I've had too many times where I've gone looking for something that I saw on my desk a few months back, and it's gone. Invariably I'll have the receipts for every other thing _except_ the really expensive thing that just broke. With Devon I no longer have that problem. I'm pretty disciplined about scanning receipts every weekend, but I definitely have to stay on top of it for the system to really be effective.
I do the same thing, but I just scan with Fujitsu ScanSnap and dump in a huge folder in Dropbox. They're OCR'ed and named with the date by default, and that's enough that I can basically always find what I want.
That said, I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans. To the point where I wonder if the scanning is even worth it. Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday? I do set aside tax documents when they come, and other "action items", so those are a different case. I'm talking about just the stuff I scan for archival purposes. Seems really unlikely that I actually need that stuff in digital format.
For non-paper stuff, I use Evernote. There again though, I have dozens and dozens of notebooks and stacks of notebooks that hold my thousands of notes and it's getting overwhelming. It's getting to the point where I just use my "recent notes", my 10-20 shortcuts for notes I use all the time, and search for everything else.
They could be scanning things around to find patterns of human relationships from face recognition, could have backups that persist forever after you delete or provide data to government or whatever and you won't know.
Privacy policy doesn't mean shit unless you can prove it's been broken.
“Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday?”
This is basically what I do with nearly all my paper records. It's a sort of JIT filing system. “Writes” into the document store take very little time. I just dump everything into a folder for the current month. I keep a ring buffer of 12 months worth of docs. When a dirty buffer comes up as current, I quickly sort through its contents for the rare item that needs to be preserved for longer than its already year-long storage, file it in a more persistent place, then toss the rest.
This comes at the expense of making “reads” from the document store more expensive. But as you point out, fetching docs from this system is relatively rare. It's more than worth the time (and cognitive overhead) to have to occasionally flip through a couple date-delimited folders to fetch a document I need to retrieve.
I found DevinThink at the end of last year and ended paying up for the full premium version for ocr when they had on a Christmas sale. Not sure why I never seen it before as it’s been around a very long time.
I used Evernote extensively for notes + going paperless. I was never comfortable and know better than storing private documents such as bank statements in Evernote (someone else’s computer aka cloud) but it was convenient and worked well.
I’m now slowly migrating Evernote content to Devonthink. It works extremely well, it is powerful and no subscription, it’s not cheap but as a dev I know development isn’t cheap and the price is justified for its functionality. Like you said you can get all the data you put in back out easily no lock in. Sure it’s not as shiny as newer hyped software but it works and is functional. I have some Hazel rules setup for example auto file downloaded statements.
What WebDAV server are you using? I tried NGinx but had issues as NGinx doesn’t fully support WebDAV, it was just that I already had a NGinx server running. WSGIWebDav seemed to work ok testing but not set it up properly yet on my NAS, wasn’t sure about trying Apache. My idea is to use WebDAV with all access via VPN to get same sync functionality as Evernote. WebDAV for syncing completely makes sense and was another reason I purchased it.
I tend to keep most of my documents in Dropbox or iCloud, and use Alfred to find what I want by typing a word that I think is in the title. Dropbox can search within documents too, and I try to have an organized file structure.
Source code is in a Code directory. I try to keep that directory clean - only stuff I'm actually working on. Everything is in Git and can be pulled down very quickly if I need to spin it up again.
I used to love a document database that was geared for researchers and others who have to catalog a lot of information. It's called DevonThink. I had a license for it from one of the MacHeist bundles, but it was really overkill for my document needs.
- Photos, music, documents, calendars, etc. synced through iCloud
- Other various stuff in iCloud Drive, symlinked to ~/cloud for easy access. Got a stash directory there for random files that I can't bother organizing
Everything else I assume is ephemeral and don't mind if lost.
Using Git for tech projects.
Same for dotfiles. No plugins so everything just works by copying to ~.
Have tried all apps out there, even the "Database" ones - but it's not portable and it's an instant lock-in. Plus most of the Apps bind to folders anyway, so you'll have a lot of "junk" that you have no idea what it is.
What I've found to work is this.
Main root folders few and named easily.
- Customers
- Internal
- Private
- VMs
All sub-folders have numbers, so they can always sort by name so they're always in the same order.
00 - Tests
10 - Code
11 - Code (Testing)
12 - Code (Other)
20 - Design (Sites)
25 - Design (Other)
30 - Services
35 - Marketing
40 - Apps (Web)
41 - Apps (Hosted)
50 - Docs
51 - Guides
60 - Sysadmin
etc...
This creates a logical and consequential structure that's easy to update, change and manage and you can have many levels.
Just consider your numbers for your use-case so you won't run out and sub-numbers can be unclear/messy to look at and navigate.
For managing downloaded files automatically, I use Hazel.
Alphabetically sorting it, would make it harder to find and use what you need the most - but by using a numbered structure you can have the most used folders at the top.
Also, I've found that I remember position easier than visually looking it up alphabetically.
I heavily use the keyboard to jump to certain folders in Finder, e.g. "p" jumps to "projects". Not possible with this system unless you remember each and every number.
It's kinda funny. Classic MacOS had a spacial file manager, so folders and files stayed where you put them. I'm guessing that isn't true anymore? This kind of thing seems like a regression.
I found we didn’t appreciate the spatial thinking ability of human brain enough. Right now what we got is the tech that gives us shallow 2-dimensional way ‘browser-style’ to interact with digital things, for the sake of convenient and less clutter.
The same thing can applied to physical books. No matter how convenient e-book reader is, it NEVER give me the same experience. For physical book, you can just feel the progress of story just by looking at that thickness of the book, or you can tell WHERE the event in the story happened (e.g. at top right section of certain page, for example) Can’t do that with e-book, every page is the same, not to mention when you change the text size and it reflow the paragraph...poof! Gone.
Somehow, the physicality of physical book made me read it till the end. Yes, the Kindle is also single-purpose device made for reading, but also a touch away from ton of books in your library, too, which is distraction in another form.
(and no, I don’t care for inky or old paper smell)
-Barebone folders. Tags don't play well with terminal and other *nix filesys.
-A ~/dev folder with dev stuff in it.
-Dropbox/iCloud for important, heavily accessed content.
-Alias on the Desktop for all the WIP/very active projects (usually from my ~/dev/ stuff and synced folder w/ dropbox or icloud)
-Dock folder shortcuts for often accessed folders + grid pop-up menu so I can dragNdrop stuff.
- Also, Finder sidebar shortcuts for these folders.
- Downloads are always messy, I usually clean-up every year when I fresh install the new release of macOS.
- For images/photos/etc I tend to use dirs with year and quarter numbers, like 19Q1 as for the 1st quarter os 2019.
Prevents huge dirs that take too long for Finder/Samba to index.
The thing can be easily implemented with mdutils (may not be the actual name, i’m On my phone so can’t check) and bash. You can setup a few common destination folders, and watch folders such as the ~/downalods. Then you can still use tags for files, and run a bash script which read the tag of files with mdutils, then move files based on tag pattern to different destinations.
Hazel and maid both can do this, but I don’t wan to spend that much on something I can scramble in a hour nor learn Ruby. So I just use bash for this.
Learn to love Search, but give yourself a manual cheat mode that doesn't take any effort to maintain.
I use the application "Hazel" with two tactics, one to clean up Desktop, one to clean up Downloads.
For desktop, I use a freshness rule, and then a manual lookup hack. If it's likely this file isn't changing any more, Hazel sweeps it into folder.
In downloads, I do freshness, but with a variant manual lookup hack.
DO GIVE YOURSELF A MANUAL/MEMORY METHOD TO FINDING FILES
What I mean by manual cheat mode or manual hack is, can I find this file very quickly using just what I have in my head, without having had to identify content and file accordingly?
For the hack, I file by buckets of dates. What I've found is, I can generally recall what I was working on when I had that file, and from that I can recall generally when I was working on it. So, if I can "file by date" with an appropriate granularity where I balance a fuzzy "when" with a glanceable number of files, then I can find it by looking in usually one but at most maybe three buckets. Bonus: date folders also make it easy to scope searches.
Depending on the nature of work, my buckets range from quarterly at the largest, to weekly at the smallest. I name them YYYY QN/FILE, YYYY/YYYY-MM/FILE, or YYYY/YYYY-WW/FILE. If I'm doing quarterly, the folders are not nested inside the year.
For downloads, I add a layer between the date folder and file: domain. I used to just use domain and replace files of same name like "latest.zip" but over time I began to value having the prior version of downloaded things. So downloads look like YYYY QN/DOMAIN/FILE.
AUTOMATED SCHEME EXAMPLE
Putting it together, my current scheme on home laptop is:
Desktop
- File by Week Last Opened > YYYY QN/FILE
method: sort into subfolder
trigger: date last opened not blank and last opened is not last 2 days
date = date last opened
- File by Week Last Modified If Not Opened > YYYUY QN/FILE
method: sort into subfolder
trigger: date last opened is blank and last modified is not last 2 days
date = date modified
Downloads
- Quarterly Sources > YYYY/DOMAIN/FILE
method: sort into subfolder
trigger: date added not last 4 weeks
date = date added
Hazel has additional features such as what to do with duplicates, that you can tailor to your preferences.
As a further bucketing mechanism, if you use many machines for different modalities and collect all those files into a single 'cloud' place they all can reach, you can append the machine or hostname to the dated bucket. That lets you have selective sync rules to different machines, but also find all the content in one place.
ALWAYS BE ORGANIZED, BY NEVER ORGANIZING!
I never file anything anywhere, I just let these rules grab them and squirrel them away. If I need a set of files across dated folders, monthly bank PDFs for example, I pop open a folder, see the relevant filename, and run a search for that, then select all and send to accountant.
SPECIALS
Code repos are special cased, within a source code management folder tree, not worked from desktop. Vagrant and Virtual Box VMs, Pictures, Media, Music, also special case managed by their tools.
I like your rule based approach. I think I'll try it for myself.
My main "problem" with organization methods, is that I feel they get in the way of my creation process.
If i'm creating a PPT and I need an icon pack I don't want to think to where should I donwload it, if the project as a folder, where to export it or whatever... Just give me the icons, right now Im creating a presentation, I could care less about how my files are structured.
The final presentation will end up on google drive, or somwhere else "safe".
Your approach allows me to do this, and keep everything organized at the same time.
I don't have a ton of files, but I'm impressed at how quickly silver searcher[0] can find things. `-g` if the filename is specific enough. A bit longer, but not too bad if I need to search by content instead.
For a start, I don’t have anything at all on the desktop. The download folder is always clean, because I either delete files or just move them to folders in documents. I am a perfectionist, and so I am calmer.
My top level directories are like: Accounts, Clients, Projects, Apps. Then sub-directories etc. I use symlinks e.g. when a client project is reused as an App or vice-versa.
Everything initially gets downloaded into ~/Downloads and then moved as appropriate. Having two Finder windows open makes this very easy. One stays on ~/Downloads and the other changed to suit the destination.
I am a heavy Terminal user, with multiple active windows, so most of my current work-in-progress is a "cd ...".
I replicate the above to a Linux desktop with rsync based scripts. So I basically perform the same activities on both platforms, e.g. LibreOffice, etc. Hardly use any Apple software anymore, notable exception being iTunes for the various iPads and iPods around the house and car.
I keep all my development projects in ~/Workspace. Everything else goes in either iCloud Documents (if they're important documents) or in ~/Documents if they're not. (I got the 200GB iCloud subscription btw).
I use ~/Desktop strictly for transient files, which I delete frequently. I still let Time Machine back it up, though, in case I accidentally delete something I meant to save. Time Machine has saved my life from accidental deletes more often than I can recall.
Thinking about it, my local storage is quite lean. Ever since I started using iCloud for photos and documents, my local storage has only been used for git repos (and apps, of course).
TagSpaces. Some native color tagging for clean up and directory mindfulness. I use TagSpaces to mainly create a data retention schedule for tax and finance data, then per the schedule, actually delete the old crap.
I've learned not to rename the default ~/{Pictures,Downloads,Desktop,Documents,Videos,Music} as they conveniently have the same name regardless of the OS and there are many applications and default actions bound to them. Desktop blank. For everything else unix style filesystem convention - directories at the ~/, all lowercase, name 3-5 characters long.
I have a ~/dev folders with all my git projects. Then a ~/shared folder with stuff shared with a linux server at work (synchronized using unison). Everything else is on Icloud. I usually have a few files/folders on the desktop waiting for being sorted. I've never had any use for tags.
142 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI know a few people who use tags effectively. I never found it to work for me either.
On the other hand I find Spotlight to be pretty good at finding stuff. I use It extensively with relatively flat folder structures.
I typically go to the folder I want and then use spotlight to find whateverIm looking for.
Results are a little better, sometimes, if I search specifically in a given folder and especially if the terms are in the filename. But it really should work globally.
* Don't save files on the desktop.
* Create a Projects or Dev folder in your home directory and make a folder for each project. (For Web development, I use Laravel Valet which automatically makes a foldername.test vhost inside ~/Dev.)
* My Downloads folder is very messy. I could probably set up a job to delete files older than 6 months, but I have plenty of space, so no need (yet).
I have also taken to a few setup scripts that ensure tooling is installed, and checks out the repos in their respective directories.
Why?
Cons: It's a global namespace and easily cluttered, and the clutter is visible as the default background of your display.
It's like "saving things" on my physical desk - a bad habit I tell myself not to do, but still find myself doing. (chucks a few things that have been on my desk).
But on a physical desk I don't have options to sort, search etc. I do on the mac. I use the desktop as place for non-critical files everytime (like a screenshot that I have to attach to an email, or to export a image without background that I am going to use on a ppt). Basically just as a temp folder.
It is absolutly cluttered, but the ability to drop a temporary file there without thinking of structure or what it relates to trumps the clutter it creates.
Besides, with the addition of Stacks (https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT209101) it makes everything more manageable.
Documents aren’t stuffed into some database, either. They’re indexed and stored in a folder hierarchy that you can still access. This makes it easy to search and find them with tools like Alfred or Quicksilver or Spotlight. You can open them directly using apps like Word, and Devon doesn’t care. Devon also has an inbox you can use with Finder, so when you drop a file into the folder, it automatically moves to an Inbox folder in Devon for you to process and move to a final destination within the app.
It’s truly a fantastic piece of software.
https://www.devontechnologies.com/products/freeware.html
Then I created some folders for large groups, like "Documents" at home or "Projects" for work, and broke it down from there. I don't have more than maybe 4 levels under anything, except where there are year/month breakdowns.
AFAIK Devon doesn't work outside of its own folder/database. It doesn't index everything in my ~ for example. I create stuff in Devon or drag stuff into it from outside, holding down CMD so that it moves instead of copies.
Within Devon I'll sometimes need something in two places (all receipts and tax-deductible receipts, for example), so I'll use Devon's "replicate" function to make a pointer to the same doc. For work stuff, I have templates (release_plan.md) that I'll "duplicate" to a new project. As long as they're the same, Devon has an icon that says so, but as soon as I edit one, they diverge into independent docs.
I also use Devon to rip web pages, either to save as a bookmark or as a one-page PDF, so when I find something useful for work or around any idea that interests me, I'll put it in Devon instead of a Chrome/Firefox/Safari bookmark. I never remember what's in the URL of a bookmark to search for it, but I do remember the content. I can search in Devon, find the PDF, and if necessary, click the link to go back to the webpage.
I write content for part of my job, so I'll use Devon for brainstorming or outlines, all in Markdown. I've written a little snippet for Keyboard Maestro so the Cmd-N in Devon asks me what type of document I want to create (markdown, plain text, or rich text), and then it creates that in the folder. If I'm doing basic stuff, like taking notes for a meeting, I just work in raw markdown, but if I'm actually formatting something like a blog post, I'll click the "Open Externally" button to open it in Macdown. I'll make action items and after the meeting transfer them to Taskwarrior for execution. I don't need to remember what happened in every meeting - I just need to remember to read the notes.
I'll collect images for blog posts and store the whole thing in a subfolder under Projects/Content/Blog/{article-slug} so that everything is nicely organized. I use the Search function for those "I know I saved something about {foo} a few weeks ago" moments. Otherwise, I jump right to the project I'm working on and am confident that everything related to it is within that folder.
I've had too many times where I've gone looking for something that I saw on my desk a few months back, and it's gone. Invariably I'll have the receipts for every other thing _except_ the really expensive thing that just broke. With Devon I no longer have that problem. I'm pretty disciplined about scanning receipts every weekend, but I definitely have to stay on top of it for the system to really be effective.
That said, I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans. To the point where I wonder if the scanning is even worth it. Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday? I do set aside tax documents when they come, and other "action items", so those are a different case. I'm talking about just the stuff I scan for archival purposes. Seems really unlikely that I actually need that stuff in digital format.
For non-paper stuff, I use Evernote. There again though, I have dozens and dozens of notebooks and stacks of notebooks that hold my thousands of notes and it's getting overwhelming. It's getting to the point where I just use my "recent notes", my 10-20 shortcuts for notes I use all the time, and search for everything else.
You trust Dropbox with that sort of thing?
This is basically what I do with nearly all my paper records. It's a sort of JIT filing system. “Writes” into the document store take very little time. I just dump everything into a folder for the current month. I keep a ring buffer of 12 months worth of docs. When a dirty buffer comes up as current, I quickly sort through its contents for the rare item that needs to be preserved for longer than its already year-long storage, file it in a more persistent place, then toss the rest.
This comes at the expense of making “reads” from the document store more expensive. But as you point out, fetching docs from this system is relatively rare. It's more than worth the time (and cognitive overhead) to have to occasionally flip through a couple date-delimited folders to fetch a document I need to retrieve.
I used Evernote extensively for notes + going paperless. I was never comfortable and know better than storing private documents such as bank statements in Evernote (someone else’s computer aka cloud) but it was convenient and worked well.
I’m now slowly migrating Evernote content to Devonthink. It works extremely well, it is powerful and no subscription, it’s not cheap but as a dev I know development isn’t cheap and the price is justified for its functionality. Like you said you can get all the data you put in back out easily no lock in. Sure it’s not as shiny as newer hyped software but it works and is functional. I have some Hazel rules setup for example auto file downloaded statements.
What WebDAV server are you using? I tried NGinx but had issues as NGinx doesn’t fully support WebDAV, it was just that I already had a NGinx server running. WSGIWebDav seemed to work ok testing but not set it up properly yet on my NAS, wasn’t sure about trying Apache. My idea is to use WebDAV with all access via VPN to get same sync functionality as Evernote. WebDAV for syncing completely makes sense and was another reason I purchased it.
Source code is in a Code directory. I try to keep that directory clean - only stuff I'm actually working on. Everything is in Git and can be pulled down very quickly if I need to spin it up again.
I used to love a document database that was geared for researchers and others who have to catalog a lot of information. It's called DevonThink. I had a license for it from one of the MacHeist bundles, but it was really overkill for my document needs.
- ~/code for personal projects
- Photos, music, documents, calendars, etc. synced through iCloud
- Other various stuff in iCloud Drive, symlinked to ~/cloud for easy access. Got a stash directory there for random files that I can't bother organizing
Everything else I assume is ephemeral and don't mind if lost.
Using Git for tech projects. Same for dotfiles. No plugins so everything just works by copying to ~.
What I've found to work is this.
Main root folders few and named easily.
- Customers
- Internal
- Private
- VMs
All sub-folders have numbers, so they can always sort by name so they're always in the same order.
00 - Tests
10 - Code
11 - Code (Testing)
12 - Code (Other)
20 - Design (Sites)
25 - Design (Other)
30 - Services
35 - Marketing
40 - Apps (Web)
41 - Apps (Hosted)
50 - Docs
51 - Guides
60 - Sysadmin
etc...
This creates a logical and consequential structure that's easy to update, change and manage and you can have many levels.
Just consider your numbers for your use-case so you won't run out and sub-numbers can be unclear/messy to look at and navigate.
For managing downloaded files automatically, I use Hazel.
No need to feel so cramped then.
Like i wrote, consider your numbers for your needs.
Also, I've found that I remember position easier than visually looking it up alphabetically.
The same thing can applied to physical books. No matter how convenient e-book reader is, it NEVER give me the same experience. For physical book, you can just feel the progress of story just by looking at that thickness of the book, or you can tell WHERE the event in the story happened (e.g. at top right section of certain page, for example) Can’t do that with e-book, every page is the same, not to mention when you change the text size and it reflow the paragraph...poof! Gone.
Somehow, the physicality of physical book made me read it till the end. Yes, the Kindle is also single-purpose device made for reading, but also a touch away from ton of books in your library, too, which is distraction in another form.
(and no, I don’t care for inky or old paper smell)
-A ~/dev folder with dev stuff in it.
-Dropbox/iCloud for important, heavily accessed content.
-Alias on the Desktop for all the WIP/very active projects (usually from my ~/dev/ stuff and synced folder w/ dropbox or icloud)
-Dock folder shortcuts for often accessed folders + grid pop-up menu so I can dragNdrop stuff.
- Also, Finder sidebar shortcuts for these folders.
- Downloads are always messy, I usually clean-up every year when I fresh install the new release of macOS.
- For images/photos/etc I tend to use dirs with year and quarter numbers, like 19Q1 as for the 1st quarter os 2019. Prevents huge dirs that take too long for Finder/Samba to index.
Hazel and maid both can do this, but I don’t wan to spend that much on something I can scramble in a hour nor learn Ruby. So I just use bash for this.
Learn to love Search, but give yourself a manual cheat mode that doesn't take any effort to maintain.
I use the application "Hazel" with two tactics, one to clean up Desktop, one to clean up Downloads.
For desktop, I use a freshness rule, and then a manual lookup hack. If it's likely this file isn't changing any more, Hazel sweeps it into folder.
In downloads, I do freshness, but with a variant manual lookup hack.
DO GIVE YOURSELF A MANUAL/MEMORY METHOD TO FINDING FILES
What I mean by manual cheat mode or manual hack is, can I find this file very quickly using just what I have in my head, without having had to identify content and file accordingly?
For the hack, I file by buckets of dates. What I've found is, I can generally recall what I was working on when I had that file, and from that I can recall generally when I was working on it. So, if I can "file by date" with an appropriate granularity where I balance a fuzzy "when" with a glanceable number of files, then I can find it by looking in usually one but at most maybe three buckets. Bonus: date folders also make it easy to scope searches.
Depending on the nature of work, my buckets range from quarterly at the largest, to weekly at the smallest. I name them YYYY QN/FILE, YYYY/YYYY-MM/FILE, or YYYY/YYYY-WW/FILE. If I'm doing quarterly, the folders are not nested inside the year.
For downloads, I add a layer between the date folder and file: domain. I used to just use domain and replace files of same name like "latest.zip" but over time I began to value having the prior version of downloaded things. So downloads look like YYYY QN/DOMAIN/FILE.
AUTOMATED SCHEME EXAMPLE
Putting it together, my current scheme on home laptop is:
Hazel has additional features such as what to do with duplicates, that you can tailor to your preferences.As a further bucketing mechanism, if you use many machines for different modalities and collect all those files into a single 'cloud' place they all can reach, you can append the machine or hostname to the dated bucket. That lets you have selective sync rules to different machines, but also find all the content in one place.
ALWAYS BE ORGANIZED, BY NEVER ORGANIZING!
I never file anything anywhere, I just let these rules grab them and squirrel them away. If I need a set of files across dated folders, monthly bank PDFs for example, I pop open a folder, see the relevant filename, and run a search for that, then select all and send to accountant.
SPECIALS
Code repos are special cased, within a source code management folder tree, not worked from desktop. Vagrant and Virtual Box VMs, Pictures, Media, Music, also special case managed by their tools.
My main "problem" with organization methods, is that I feel they get in the way of my creation process.
If i'm creating a PPT and I need an icon pack I don't want to think to where should I donwload it, if the project as a folder, where to export it or whatever... Just give me the icons, right now Im creating a presentation, I could care less about how my files are structured.
The final presentation will end up on google drive, or somwhere else "safe".
Your approach allows me to do this, and keep everything organized at the same time.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/unix/my-file-system
https://www.shivagaire.com.np/python/2018/08/09/organize-you...
I don't have a ton of files, but I'm impressed at how quickly silver searcher[0] can find things. `-g` if the filename is specific enough. A bit longer, but not too bad if I need to search by content instead.
[0] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
Everything initially gets downloaded into ~/Downloads and then moved as appropriate. Having two Finder windows open makes this very easy. One stays on ~/Downloads and the other changed to suit the destination.
I am a heavy Terminal user, with multiple active windows, so most of my current work-in-progress is a "cd ...".
I replicate the above to a Linux desktop with rsync based scripts. So I basically perform the same activities on both platforms, e.g. LibreOffice, etc. Hardly use any Apple software anymore, notable exception being iTunes for the various iPads and iPods around the house and car.
I use ~/Desktop strictly for transient files, which I delete frequently. I still let Time Machine back it up, though, in case I accidentally delete something I meant to save. Time Machine has saved my life from accidental deletes more often than I can recall.
Thinking about it, my local storage is quite lean. Ever since I started using iCloud for photos and documents, my local storage has only been used for git repos (and apps, of course).
~Documents/$project_name/
~code/$project_name/$repo
And an external HDD over SMB for downloads(/Movies, /Series, /Music, /Books et and a general folder /Spam - it gets cleaned once in a while)
Pretty much it.
~/projects
Dead projects go in:
~/projects/archive