2023-01-01 Notes from research today re: thinking about folder organisation. Thanks r/datahoarder and r/datacurator.
Separate Datahoard from Ephemeral (computer-specific) folders.
Possibly that means Infohoard has EVERYTHING in it. We will need another folder for Computer documentation - That would likely go to Documents or Literature... unless we put it all here lol We'll also want to.. I think probably download a couple entire websites as an archive, 'cause we certainly have an awful lot of bookmarks from some stires in particular that we'd want to save before we lose them. As well as hopefully save a bunch of webpages in case those go down, 'cause fuck knows that keeps happening to my bookmarks. We do sometimes archive.org them but still... what if that goes down too, yunno? Or if we just don't have internet for a bit. It's a lot of work though, we're already just starting to try and fucking orgnaise the bookmarks better.
Root: some folders all well-thourght-out top-level categories, bare-minimum files eg. a plain text or markdown readme doc that describes structure.
/Audio /Archive (website clones, phone backups? Or just stick Websites in a folder, and back up phone stuff to accurate places.) ./Podcast ./Audiobook ./Music /Documents /Downloads (aka to-sort) /Images [undecided] ./Photos ../[undecided: phone vs DSLR?] ./My Art ../by year? ./Screenshots /Literature ./Nonfiction ./Books ./Journal Articles ../Topic ./Fiction ../Author .../Series /Software ./Games ../symlinks to games stored elsewhere 'cause of steam & whatever? ./Applications ./Virtual Machines /Video ./TV ../Series .../Season ./Movies ...Series ./Music videos ./Educational ./Fluff (humurous YT vids, cats, etc)
Literature formatted roughly like a library; Documents formatted very differently for personal use. Documents = scanned documents, tax returns, etc.
"When I used to start out collecting something to hoard ... I would carefully organize it with many sublevels/etc. At one point I was even custom-tagging all my music with "moods". Then, a few years later, I realize.... I've rarely if ever actually gone through and gotten utility out of the careful sorting I did of all that data. Far more often than not, I would find that something else would spur me to look for something I'd "sorted" earlier, and I'd just end up searching-to-locate it. So, I'd be looking at lists on IMDB, and then I would do a global search (locate32) for ".mkv pub domain legit" and I'd instantly find my "Public Domain Totally Legit To Hoard 2 - The Sequel!.mkv" that way...not getting anything out of all the careful curating I'd done.
"Eventually I realized I use locate32 to pull up basically everything. I have it hotkeyed globally to a key on my keyboard, so I can pull it up with no effort whatsoever no matter what I'm doing, and navigate to a file within a few seconds, regardless of where it is.
"This does require that you had search terms in your filename (and/OR folder names leading up to the file). As time has gone by, I've started just saving things in flat folder structures with search terms I know I will find later... at work I have a ton of files named things like "script powershell to do smtp email send test.txt.ps1" for instance. It's ugly, but I know how I search-to-locate, and I know I'll be able to pull that up in 2.5 seconds with zero effort even 1 year later. I have that file, and tens of thousands like it, just sitting in huge flat folders. It's amazingly effective...I can pull up almost anything I've ever saved, even from years ago, within a few seconds, almost without fail. Sometimes when I need to recall something done for a client 2 years ago, and I type a few characters and insta-find something, I feel superhuman lol."
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