Ask HN: What are your favorite methodologies for organizing digital life

I use org-roam and hyperlink to files / folders on disk to make them discoverable like any other thoughts I store in org-roam. Using TRAMP you can even link to remote files over SSH or other protocols.

If you're not an Emacs fan and you din't want to be, Logseq is another tool that looks like it can be used in a similar way.

What are your goals for this system? Quick inserts or quick retrieval? Perfection or good enough? How important is it to you, and how much work are you willing to put into it?

It's tempting to design the perfect system for an archivist, but you might realise that it's too much maintenance for a regular guy who has a life.

Personally, I put my photos on a timeline, and the rest in a reasonable folder structure. That's about it.

I just use a load of nested folders in my `Documents` directory. I keep a `_dirinfo.txt` in each one explaining what it contains. If I see something I haven't used in ages and don't expect to need again, I move it to an `old/` directory and forget about it. And I keep my miscellaneous notes in an obsidian vault.

Well, disk space has consistently gotten cheaper, so for me it's c:\old_drive_2020\old_drive_2016\old_drive_2010 ... :P

IMO first you want to:

1. Gauge how likely you are to need things, and to split them apart on that basis. Don't bother organizing stuff that doesn't (yet, perhaps ever) need organizing.

2. Determine which things you can filename/text-search for if you need them, versus which things _need_ a good folder-organization because they are not easy to index or find metadata for.

I feel no shame having my MIDI collection from the 90s buried somewhere inside "Old Music" if I never really end up looking at it.

I have all of my photos (with the exception of smartphone photos... ugh) in a nicely constructed set of folders \photos\yyyy\yyyymmmdd\ then the folder made by the camera, etc. I've got a small python script to generate the folders.

I use Digikam[1] to do facial recognition and tagging on them. It's finally gotten to the point where it doesn't crash all the time writing metadata, and the facial recognition is acceptable. It's nowhere near as good as Picassa was, but the last release had a horrible bug that sometimes swapped face tags if there were multiple people in a photo. Those would them lead to bad training data, and it kept getting worse.

At one point in time, I JPEG2000 compressed all my photos to save disk space.... it was a huge mistake, and now I've got to try to recover the original jpegs from CDs and old backups.

[1] https://digikam.org/

I like Karl Voit's methodology. He goes more deep into Personal Information Management than anyone I've seen.

> For a couple of years, I taught PIM in a lecture at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences. My students are surprised, how inefficient they were doing even «common» things like handling email, managing files like photographs on your computer, or searching for information. It is so rewarding to see students realizing how much improvement is possible with some background-knowledge and a few hints here or there. Starting with 2021, that lecture started at Graz University of Technology.

> I hereby claim that I am able to save you at least twenty minutes of your computer time a day just by looking over your shoulder and suggesting more advanced tools, better methods, and efficient workflows.

https://karl-voit.at/tags/pim/

I'd advice you to ask people who have done this for decades; not the tinkerers who play with the next new shiny tech out there (pseudo-literal the definition of the HN front page).

Who may have this knowledge you may ask?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_scienc...

Here's one possibility: https://johnnydecimal.com/. Good luck - please share what works for you so the rest of us can learn.

reading:

RSS feeds

Facebook

Email

saving:

documents/subject folders

pictures/subject folders or

pictures/yyyy mm dd subject folders

videos as for pictures also youtube channel organized chronologically

A notepad window with a TODO list and set of links out to stuff (like docs or PRs to review). Or quick ideas, etc.

I just brain dump what’s most important in the morning and triage my work. Then get to it. If something comes up instead of reacting immediately, I paste it to the TODO list and maybe a short note.

Otherwise I’ll just work on first thing that comes to mind, or first message I react to, not the most important.

Start with goals. “With all this stuff I hope…” or think what you hope to be true in three years. Work back from that. The default (which is great if you like) is I’d like to spend a lot of time shuffling digital resources.

Why even bother, besides the fact that it’s fun to tinker with storage and backup solutions?

When’s the last time you looked at any of that stuff? If it was all deleted today, what would you honestly miss most? Save that and forget about everything else.

It really depends on what data you're processing with. For someone whose data is hundreds of tetrabytes, the workflow to saving those data and manipulating or retrieving those data as request becomes very tricky, very hard task, especially when you think about the backup time. Maybe you can scale down the concept of L1, L2, L3 cache but at a higher, bigger scale. And always figure out what's the most important things to you at different stages and make those choices. You definitely compromise something in order to have large scale of data. So, again, it's about figuring out what's most important to you.

> How do you organize your digital library?

Files in nested folders. Symbolic links, when a file or folder does not fit into a single category.

(Ask HN) - may also get more responses if correctly titled.

Ebooks:

- Calibre to manage my offline collection: In case the Internet goes down or some site disappears

- Zotero (Papers and books to learn from)

Images:

- Apple Photos: I only take pictures with my iPhone

- Screenshot: Automatically goes to my desktop, which is synced with iCloud.

Movies:

- I have a old Mini that I use as a file server. Everything is there

Documents:

- PARA method (I barely produced documents on my personal devices, so I haven't upgraded anything)

Music:

- I have an offline FLAC library, but streaming is more convenient right now. I'm using the `Collection/Artists/Albums` folder pattern.

There's not much else, I only hoard books (and my favorite albums). Anything else can be deleted.

- Have a password manager that someone else also knows the password to

- Have one obvious spot to put things. For example for photos: have one directory for all of them, and make subdirectories there by either the device that took it (I remember better whether I took a photo with device A or B than whether it was in 2017 or 2016) or whatever else you prefer. Use broad, obvious categories ("photos", "audiobooks/English", "audiobooks/Dutch", "games/downloaded", "games/self-made", etc.) for the main folder names.

- Don't let data get stuck on old devices. Keep track of in which folders you've stored data and, once those are copied over, give it e.g. a few months. If you didn't need to go back to the device, wipe the device. Don't be me. I have a phone from 2012 that I still haven't finished migrating.

- Have backups. Make making a backup easy. Just take the whole disk. (Games will store your save files in places you didn't know existed.) Mark the backups as backups, so you don't have to think "eh, am I going to find any original data on this 2008 hard drive or was it just a backup copy I can wipe?". Don't be teenage me.

- When in doubt, use year-month-NAME for files and directories, then the rest of the name matters a lot less as you're likely to remember the year and season that a given thing happened in. (System timestamps are prone to being lost upon migration, or get updated when you fix a typo while reading.)

- Folders can have an 'archive' subfolder for things you may need one day, but that you aren't likely to ever touch again. I used to keep one folder per school/internship/employer, and it got a bit much. Moving old things into an archive subfolder helps and I don't have to feel like I will lose the data (it's not like I marked it for expunging).

- Have a temporary folder whose entries are prefixed with an expiry date. This contains "just in case" files, like a copy of my Signal messages database before I start messing with the database (I'll know latest in a few days that I didn't need the backup). I also put call notes here, like when someone calls me and I want to make sure I've saved the file but don't have a project folder for it, but it might turn into a project, I could put it here with some months' expiry. If nothing came of it, it can be safely deleted and I don't have to review the contents to know whether it's irrelevant.

SMS: I decant my phone’s database into my IMAP mailbox. I love being able to search across all my conversations and access then on any device that can access my email.

Let my storage/backup harddrives finally fail so that I lose everything. OK, not the strategy, but has happened. It seems like an unwinnable war. Seeing how digital artifacts are reportedly showing up in photos on Google Photo, knowing that bitrot happens, etc, I'm not sure what a great answer is. So I'm resigned to the idea that I eventually lose it all anyway. Maybe I try to print out all the photos that matter to me this time.

On every drive, I have a two top level subfolders with a one-character name. One for stuff that I back up, and one for stuff I don't (e.g. Steam Libraries usually go in the second one).

I'll just give examples of folders you might find on those drives.

- /Applications/Audio/Renoise/

- /AppsPortable/Images/Krita/

- /AppsData/SublimeText/ <-- project files go here

- /Drop/Downloads/Browser

- /Drop/HTTrack/SiteName

All "my" stuff (mostly things I made or personal documents, or things I curated for personal use) goes into a /Docs/ directory structure, which is similarly straightforward:

- /Docs/Projects/NameOfProject

- /Docs/Resources/Icons/Objects/Tech/joystick.png

- /Docs/Images/Created/ <- everything I made that's an image but not a photo

- /Docs/Images/In/Canon50D/012 <- I just increase that by one each time I dump my CF card, and then take my sweet time to sort that

- /Docs/Images/Out/Pub/2023/ <- uploaded RAW photos named [year]-[month]-[day]_[hour]_[minute]-[second] go here, in case of events or vacations I might make a subfolder for them

- /Docs/Images/Scanned

I also use synthing extensively, so there's a subset of that structure for things I want to have on my phone, too.

- SyncThings/Thang/Audio/AudioBooks/

- SyncThings/Thang/Audio/Music/

- SyncThings/Thang/Audio/Talks/

- SyncThings/Thang/keybass.dbx

etc.

Contacts I keep on a little Baïkal installation, and thanks to DAVx⁵ that means I can edit my phone contacts in Thunderbird, which is so awesome.

I don't want to make this post go on forever, but FWIW I made good exsperiences with going overboard in this way: because at this point, I know where any given thing "belongs". Sometimes I even download something, put it "where it belongs", and see it's already there. Of course I also have plenty of unsorted files here and there, but knowing I could sort them rather easily is nice.

This will probably not work for everyone, but works pretty well for me. I simply use the "default" Mac OS/iOS apps:

- Photos (shared via iCloud)

- Notes

- Music

- iCloud for file storage

- I also use google docs for spreadsheets etc.

This pretty much covers my digital life and mostly meet my requirement to be on auto-pilot.

fzf to open anything in HOME.

immutable backups of HOME in s3[1].

usb drives with encryption keys and s3 creds stashed all over.

always setup new pc/os via backup restore with usb drive keys.

every new pc/os gets a new backup location.

1. https://github.com/nathants/backup

I just delete pretty much everything every couple years, with the exception of photos, which don't need to be organized as they're already sorted by date and geotagged and can be searched with computer vision nowadays...

No point in hanging on to anything you don't use at least once a year.

when saving files i type something like fjfjwoaefawoefuawojefjiaowef.jpg and then am always amazed when it says ive already created a file with that exact file name

I am building just that. A few weeks off.