100% of everything is on the desktop. No borders no boundaries to divide the working class programs against themselves

I used to have complete anarchy in my Downloads folder, but I’ve since reformed my ways and now my Downloads folder is clean and my Videos and Documents folders are complete anarchy instead.

It goes to the Desktop, when the Desktop is full I delete everything that looks unimportant 👍

Your question made me curious, so I counted: the subdirectories in my home directory reach a maximum of 26 levels deep.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Organizing is one thing but it’s better to reduce your brainpower-spending regardless of what you do.

On Windows? Custom iconed folders and explorer bookmarks go a long way. Better than relying on Quick Access or whatever.

On desktop Linux? Tools like fd and zoxide (z) save you as long as your directory names are consistent. Sticking to names-like-this reduces guesswork and you can skip around in seconds. (Saved me many a due date.)

On Android, consult Indiana Jones. Your files are a treasure – they’re staying hidden

I use this thing, I find it pretty useful

Ideally:

• Well-organized set of frequently-used and recent files on my laptop
• Media and old documents on my NAS, synced to an external hard drive I can remove for travel
• Each device/non-backup drive/USB drive/SD card backed up to its own folder on a large external drive
• A duplicate of said drive from another manufacturer
• An archival copy of my documents and photos (encrypted on microSD ofc) that I carry with me
• Additional copy of the most important stuff on M-Discs

Reality:

• Controlled mess on my laptop
• Dumping ground of random YT videos and CD rips on my NAS
• A well-curated external drive prepared in my pandemic free time
• An external drive with somewhat periodic backups of my devices alongside every unsorted file. I worry that some file paths have grown too long
• Duplicate of the two above on one large external drive
• Another external drive with files and backups of dubious usefulness that I refuse to delete
• An outdated copy of my documents and photos on an everyday carry microSD
• A stack of unused M-Discs

These days, a shallow folder system. I have an electronica folder, and a Blanck Mass folder that definitely would go in there but that is full enough to stand on it’s own. Actual taxonomic organisation would take way too many clicks, but flat organisation can result in trouble finding things, and just looks like you’re a slob. (Although I’m guilty of having unsorted hoarder folders for things I only needed once, too)

There’s probably a rule of thumb for optimal fanout on each GUI folder, related to our visual processing. Hmm. I wonder if there’s a way to make the tree self-balancing as well.

I’ve struggled with digital organizing for decades. I tried tons of strategies from other people. There’s lots of good ideas, but ultimately you have to find something that works for you. I take some ideas from other systems and tweak them in ways that make sense for me.

I heavily rely on the default indexing of my OS. KDE is great, but most OSes have pretty good file searching tools. Just make sure to label files or at least folders in ways that are searchable.

Backups are super important (3 copies, 2 different types of media, 1 copy off site). I like to structure my data in a way that is easy to back up. I have a folder called “ephemeral” for stuff that I don’t care to back up so I don’t waste precious space. But i also try to have way more space than i need. I have a 4TB ssd on my main laptop and am planning on upgrading to 8TB soon. I have two different ZFS RAID3 arrays on my server where I copy data too. I started using syncthing to keep different types of media backed up between multiple computers. That way I can decide which computer is connected to which data set. Then I take regular backups of the sever to external drives and rotate those backup off site monthly.

I like to have a folder called “archive” where i put things that I want to hold on to, but will probably never need regular access too.

I also have a sensitive data folder for things that need to be on encrypted drives like financial statements, social security, passwords, ssh keys. Keeping it together helps me from forgetting it on an unencrypted drive. I had a laptop stolen once and it sucked not knowing what they may have pulled from it.

I have a media folder that contains folders for basic file types like documents, pictures, books, music, etc. The ephemeral folder has the same folder structure, but contains files that i don’t care if they disappear or get deleted. It is annoying to keep up with this though. But investing in storage space buys me time to not deal with it.

It will never be perfect so I learned how to stop worrying and love the search.

I don’t keep anything relevant on my machine. It’s just a way to access data hosted somewhere more safe. Also files and folders are terrible ways to organize anything, even remotely like Google Drive or similar stuff. It’s Microsoft’s and Apple’s brainrot outliving the 90s. We should move forward.

deleted by creator

I try but don’t always succeed. In my main laptop, I have all misc files in the downloads folder, photos in photos, documents(pdfs, writer, math) and videos/movies in videos.

Organize?

I’ve gone super organized to absolute dumped folders over the last decade. If you have a NAS, get organized. Everything on your computer, do more loosely.

My rule with hobbies like electronics like PCB design prototyping and breadboarding, 3d printing, roadie bicycle stuff, etc., is that my collection of crap and organization scheme has failed when I forget what I have or can’t find it when I need it. I avoid the rabbit hole of making organization a priority project or taking it too far by only targeting what I need to do in order to prevent these situations of missing items.

The same goes for digital storage. My organization must be intuitive so that a year or more from now, I know where to find the thing at a glance.

One trick I learned from managing multiple connected point of sale systems for a chain of retail stores is to name your files in a way that sorts naturally. For instance, use year-month-day in file naming as opposed to nonsensical date standards. With bikes in the bike shops it was

• "Bike-
• MTB/RDR/TRI/HYB/KID-
• XS/SM/MD/LG/XL
• (Brand)-
• (Model)-
• (Year)"

Without a sales staff performing any searches I wanted bike types and sizes to naturally sort. I needed them to see exactly what was in stock in their store without thinking about the computer. I wanted them to immediately identify the range of choices available so that they could easily tell the customer what choices they have for immediate gratification. This involved me normalizing bike sizing to fit within my naming constraints as no bikes are sized the same way across brands. This is still how I think about naming schemes, they should always have sorting functionality built in. But don’t take it so far that you can’t remember the way you organized stuff without refamiliarizing yourself with the details.