How do you organize your digital stuff?

I use plex so it files have to complay with the minimum plex naming conventions:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/

My organising system has a dual nature: it is either highly structured or a mess.

Information, such as documents, notes, spreadsheets, and images, is carefully organised into well-defined directories, no more than four or five levels deep. The destination directory is chosen at the time of download.

Anything that I expect to use more than once, even if only a few times, is dumped into a directory called GMS (Games, Movies, Software), which resides on a separate disk partition.

Everything else ends up in the Downloads directory, which is truncated every three months.

Sidebar on GMS directory

GMS originally stood for Games, Music, Software. But I stopped managing my own music since switching to Spotify and now Apple Music. I rarely watched movies on my computer back in 00s; my cable TV fulfilled those needs then.

I used to manage the contents of GMS few times a year, but I have stopped doing that now since my usage of this folder has dropped by a lot since the early 2010s.

The decreased use might be explained by my increased use of package managers, Steam and GOG, and streaming services.

However, another factor could be that I now avoid situations where I would need to download anything via my browser, unless absolutely necessary. Perhaps due to lower tolerance towards such practices or reduced patience with age.

Omg now they're trying to profile where you keep your shit so their hackers can find your porn stash more efficiently. Don't tell them Pike!

D: Downloads

Then the folders -

Films

TV programs

Software

Everything inside these folders is a fucking car crash

Downloads folder is a free-for-all; things get properly sorted when they’re moved onto the NAS - there is a seperate network drive for Multimedia (videos), Applications, Photos, etc. Each of those are then usually nested by Alphabetical folder.

Anything more than 5 dir deep is overly complex.

All movies are thrown into one folder called movies, every show is in its own folder with a season per folder. Jellyfin deals with that.
Music is stored by artist and thrown into the music folder.
Documents are sorted by year and purpose but are all in one folder called documents.
Books are in e-books, audiobooks are in audiobooks folders by author.

I don't have the energy or the patience so the *arr stack organizes everything for me automatically. Not 100 levels deep, maybe a dozen or so at most, but very clean and tidy.

And more importantly, how do you back up your important stuff?

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.

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

Before even looking, I could tell you were from .ml. Stand strong, comrade!

File trees 100 folders deep but entirely in Downloads of course

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Well whenever I want to keep track of an important document, I put AAA or 000 in front of the title. And then I make several copies. And then I make multiple folders intending to organize things. And then I wind up with 30 separate docs folders yet all my documents end up in the general My Documents, Downloads, or Desktop folders instead.

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

You gotta up those numbers!

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

This is the one that hit home for me.

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

this is me, but i make another new folder and put everything in the new folder cause i don't feel like looking to see if it could be important, i'll do it later maybe
It's a good way to do it.

I sort things every once in a while but eventually lose interest or patience. Would be nice to have a way to do it automatically. I suppose llms could help there, but I'm not sure if they're quite there yet in terms of reliability.

NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I'll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.

Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they're organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.

Organize?

or have file trees 100 folders deep?

I'm felling personally attacked.

Either that or folders that are too big to load.
- When you are a Digital Hoarder like me, is both.

It’s a MESS right now.

My main computer has two partitions: Windows 10 LTSB and Windows 10 premium. I have to use Premium now due to NVidia’s drivers not working on LTSB for like… years. So I boot into my secondary, smaller partition. But I’m still installing games to my first partition. Also there’s some left over games from my LTSB install. I want to install LTSC IoT for longer support, but I’m lazy and all it does right now is play games.

So everything used to go to my 1TB HDD, but then I bought a second 4TB HDD, so now things go to that. And I back stuff up to my like, five 1-4GB external hard drives. Also there’s a Pi running OMV in the living room with a 5GH external, for media. That one’s kinda messed up right now, things are glitchy when I stream from it, so I need to reinstall everything.

Then my partner’s computer has a couple terabytes of SSD space and a single 4TB HDD. Much easier. P

2tb external hard drive, and another 2tb drive that has a copy of everything.

If it's important, or if you love your stuff, then always keep a backup.

I personally do three 5TB ext. drives, and only two drives may be at the same location at any given time. I'm also making sure only to use drives whose S.M.A.R.T. can be read without removing their enclosure.

Not sure who thought it'd be a good idea to make an external drive where S.M.A.R.T. cannot be read through whatever interface it uses.
- I'm also making sure only to use drives whose S.M.A.R.T. can be read without removing their enclosure.
  
  That's a good call, which drives have you found that support this?

My PC has a secondary HDD that has my files. Movies, books, comics, TV shows, random stuff, etc. It's more or less organized in their own folders.

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.

I have an organised Documents folder, Pictures folder, Videos folder etc synced between my devices with Syncthing. Downloads is just for temporary things I download from the web, but I never delete anything from there, so it just builds up. I keep a backup on an external 2TB SSD

At this point, with the sheer amount of data, I've structured things based on individual drives. All of my devices have the onboard SSD - I go for 1TB minimum. Call me old fashioned, but I still partition that one in two, one containing the Windows stuff and the essential 3rd party software, and a second partition which contains games, downloaded media, miscellaneous software, generally the stuff I use more frequently, but isn't vital. It's also where I store all downloads to keep the Windows partition clean and separate.

As for my external drives, I have one which I keep stuffed with game installs (2TB), and a second one which serves as my media library drive - music, movies, etc (1TB).

In terms of folder structures, I either use the default ones which come with Steam, for instance, or I keep it as simple as humanly possible (eg. Music > Artist > Album). Downloads are lumped in a single folder, wherein I may make subfolders for mass downloads of mods and such. Otherwise, Search & pray! With indexing turned off, because I like to hurt myself!

Edited to add sizes and: bought a second 2TB external which I plan on using as a back-up for my music library, some DRM-free games, and whatever movies may strike me as worth preserving.