43 Folders

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
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.

Michaelnp's picture

QuickSilver + Spotlight

I recently purchased an Intel Mac mini, and I'm in the midst of tagging everything. Once I'm done with that, I'll move most of my files directly into the ~/Documents folder. The only exceptions will be eBooks in HTML format, which require various nested folders. (Unless, of course, I could find an app to convert them to PDF format...)
After all this is done, I'll be able to find all my files by simply searching for keywords. With this setup, I will have no *explicit* organization, in terms of folder structure. It will be entirely *implicit* in the spotlight keywords I've added to each file.
Of course, most (if not all) of the credit for the inspiration for this goes to Merlin Mann. Thanks!

 
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