43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

HDD Folder oranization

How is everyone organizing their electronic data? I started out years ago with MS Outlook and hit the 2G limit early on so I ended up having to archive data monthly which resulted in a folder structure based around monthly archives like this:

2006
. Jan
. Feb
. .
. .
. Dec
2005
. Jan
. Feb

So I started following this structure and would store other files such as bank statements, pictures, invoices, etc in those folders. Problem now is finding anything I have to wait for a search to crawl through all those folders or remember when I did something or have some sort of index to it. I usually end up just hunting through the various years and months looking for what I want rather than keeping an index up to date so I'm looking for better suggestions as to how to organize inportant files.

emory's picture

I would simply upgrade my...

Berko wrote:
I would simply upgrade my drive, but it's either sign over my firstborn to Apple or void my warranty, and I'm not ready to do either.

This is why I didn't get AppleCare on my last PowerBook.

I did get the CompUSA warranty, which may have been a mistake since apparently people have a hard time collecting on it. So far, no problems. I put a boss 80GB 5400RPM Travelstar in my 12". I think I'm out of my 2 years right now, but I plan to buy a 12" MacBookPro as soon as they're available, so, whatever.

As for directory organization, there are too many Applications that like to take a dump in ~/Documents. Microsoft does it, iChat does it, Virtual PC does it, Roxio applications do it... everyone loves to leave their crap in Documents.

So I have my actual documents in ~/Documents/@TRUNK, which is also checked into an SVN repository.

I have my current projects in there, as well as my Personal and Writing folder. Books I'm working on have normal project folders but things I write for myself go to Writing. Old Projects are moved into ~/Documents/@TRUNK/Attic for safe-keeping and storage.

Snippets and sections of data and code and articles and such all live in DEVONthink. I have two databases. One is called EmoryThink, which is all the reference material I gather and pontificate about. DEVONthink is brilliant at making sense of all the crap I throw in there. I see no reason to keep my reference stuff any other way. Spotlight has got NOTHIN on DEVONthink.

My other database (and you may love this Berko) is my religious database, called God-Mining.

God-Mining is where I import scripture of various faiths, canon of the same, and categorize them appropriately and assign keywords based on topic and subject matter. Now this is where DEVONthink shines -- I can actually search against all these texts and show cross-overs between world religions and others. It is a great research tool. Sure, you could use Ocean, but that requires Windows :) Plus, DEVON is much smarter than Ocean, in my experience.

So I don't leave a whole lot of cruft on my filesystem. The small stuff and reference stuff ends up getting imported into DEVONthink and the rest is all active projects, code, and documents. I like it that way, a lot.

 
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