Comments on: Interview: Hard Drive Organization

By: yesyes

yesyes — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:49:25 +0000

I cant stand disorganization either, like all my stuff to be in folders. Same goes for my HDD maintenance, i run CCleaner religiously and also installed an automatic defragmenter that runs real time to tackle fragmentation as it occurs.

By: Claude

Claude — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:55:32 +0000

I have a folder structure. I did what Arjun did except my A-Z structure is holding files; not other folders. I am very satisfied with Spotlight .The A-Z structure if for holding general stuff. I have specialized folders to keep business,banking and journal. I am backing up with Time Machine. Music is kept in iTunes. I also use keywords to allow better searches.

Claude

By: Dean Johnson

Dean Johnson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:54:44 +0000

@Mark_Shead – While I didn’t want it to happen, especially when it happened, but it definitely adds underlines and exclamation points to the word “Backup”. It’s sorta like the empirical reinforcement of why males wear cups in contact sports like lacrosse and hockey. In one split second their value becomes crystal clear.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:49:04 +0000

@Dean – Well I don’t know that I’d want my hard drive to fail, but your method of starting fresh and just bringing things over is a really good idea.

@Adora – I’ve used shortcuts like you describe and it works well. In OSX, there is a way to create something like a shortcut, but it looks just like an original folder. This is done by using the ln command from the terminal window. You can use it to keep the same files in more than one place at once without taking up double the space. I’ve played around with this a bit on my servers, but haven’t used it on my desktop yet.

By: adora

adora — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:35:30 +0000

This is rarely mentioned in organization tips. Maybe there are some other ways(?), but I use shortcuts to cut down on confusions and avoid multiple copies of files.

For example, I organize my photos by date following the name of events. Let’s say I’m doing a scrapbook of my baby, which uses photos from various folders from various events. I would open a project folder somewhere else, make shortcut folders from photos and put them in the project folder. That way, files are in their categories but I can easily find them in related places. (If you play Super Mario, that is like putting a pile between chapters. lol)

By: Dean Johnson

Dean Johnson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:31:26 +0000

The best trick for organizing my mac laptop has been a harddrive failure. For years I have been migrating from old mac to new mac and taking all my cruft along for the ride. Disk space was getting nearly exponentially bigger, so what the hay. Then I had my drive go bad, all of a sudden. Thankfully replaced cheerfully and quickly, and for free, by the Genius Bar guys. I backed up my directory with rsync and had a two week old version, so I wasn’t too bad off. Rather than just copy everything back, saved the rsync copy off to the side and only brought over stuff that I actually used. As I fill up this drive, I am taking more time and organizing things *much* more. It has worked beautifully! Think of it as “Harddrive Bankruptcy”.

By: Ariane Benefit

Ariane Benefit — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:02:10 +0000

Thanks for including me! When I started using x1 a few years ago, Copernic was just not as easy to use. But I just took another look and I’m very impressed with the new redesign of Copernic. I’m going to switch and see how it goes. x1′s latest client is not free any more and I was actually thinking about buying it today – Copernic is still free so thanks for saving me money! : )

p.s. I also recommend using a file structure for backing up, but as a writer on so many topics, it’s really hard to file content that relates to many topics. Some I file by project, some by topic, some by media type – like photos and audio.

The neat thing about a super powerful search tool is that even if you forget how you filed something, you can find it very fast. Also, you can search by date and look for duplicates etc. so it’s also very helpful for cleanup and identifying stuff to delete.

x1 is a thousand times better and faster than Google Desktop at finding things. I suspect Copernic is too!

By: Arjun Muralidharan

Arjun Muralidharan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:22:25 +0000

Great set of answers, Mark!

Personally I think purging is the most important on the list. There’s so much crap we’ll never use again but keep.

As you said, you keep things in an own folder for a while. Personally, I got a 500gig external drive and ave Time Machine turned on. Now I’m a lot more liberal with deleting files, and always have peace of mind that some file from last january is still around… somewhere :-)

The important thing is to keep a folder structure and stick with it, or your backups won’t make much sense as you’ll be faced with the task of drilling down in your old systems.

By: Joel Falconer

Joel Falconer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:11:51 +0000

Thanks Mark – here’s to good folder organization!

Great to see all the other fantastic answers here.