I have a related concern on this topic – having certain years’ worth of very occasional snapshots, backups, etc. I need to clean this stuff up. More succinctly, what I’m saying is … without a good, clean organized home directory structure, backups are unwieldly.

For one thing, I can’t easily merge large folder trees, when they have different structures. I can do a manual merge, but that is quite tedious.

I can’t really do network backups (over the WAN) … over the LAN, yeah. But if you want to use an Internet-based backup scheme, then you need to only back up “the essentials” – so, the folder structure needs to make that easy to mark, tag, or segregate.

The main idea I’ve had on this, thus far is – keep the “media” files and libraries somehow separate/segregated from the documents, settings, and configuration information. “media” storage is inherently more bulky.

(Email storage is bulky too, but … that’s easier to organize and clean up, for some reason – probably ‘cause you can do it mostly via drag and drop in the mail client gui, and those moves/transfers don’t take very long, plus the searches and sorting results can be used to clean up the message collections. Side issue on email – my “Sent” mailboxes are always a mixed bag, I don’t know how to keep those messages cleaned and segregated!)

I rambled, but am trying to say – I need to find a good way to minimize and organize my personal files, making them easy to back up, and how to differentiate media storage (and backup) versus the smaller essentials (documents, settings/configs, records). Thanks for any advice; Larry C.