I have 2 computers (one PC, one Apple laptop), probably 5 external hard drives (mostly old and unused, two 3TB, one portable and one not), and 3 internal ones.
I have dozens of thousands of pictures in different fromats, some of them uncompressed (DNG), fairly disorganised.
I have hundreds of movies, some watched some unwatched.
I have hundreds of games, though mostly through Steam so pretty organized.
I have hundreds of random videos both mine and download from the internet.
I have a mess of documents, a lot of which are probably old saves and other trash.
I made a clean Windows install recently, but that doesnât make my âarchiveâ any less of a mess.
I have heard about software like WinDirStat, and it looks useful but I donât see how to use it.
My questions are:
-What file structure makes sense/is usable/futureproof? How should it be distributed across hard drives?
-How do I go about fitting my hundreds of thousands of files into that structure?
-Once itâs tidy, how do I make sure it stays tidy?
WinDirStat asks you which drives/folders you want to scan when you open it. select what you want and then click OK. it scans your selection and gives you a visual-aided breakdown of your space usage for the selected drives/folders.
what you might want to do is buy a NAS. if youâre serious about backup you can set up RAID which gives you a meaningful failsafe against data loss and is painless once configured.
as far as organization, these are pretty philosophical questions! i like to create category folders and sort, but itâs one of those kind of compulsive things. i like to sort and organize (doing just that for my raspberry pi romsets has been extraordinarily satisfying).
i delete movies and tv shows when iâm done with them, unless they are particularly rare or ultra high-quality. too easy to reacquire to spend space on them for my tastes.
might be worth considering making massive batch uploads to cloud services. even just something like imgur can be great for creating a sort of soft backup for photos; there are obviously paid options as well, not to mention the free space you can get on google drive, onedrive, box, dropbox, etc.
OSes all have pretty similar home folder setups, first step is follow those! Add folders where it makes sense. EG I have a âprojectsâ folder for stuff I make.
Windows is a bit inconsistent and lots of shit gets dumped in âmy documentsâ, so I donât use that one.
If I had a desktop in addition to a lappy Iâd move all my stuff there and keep the lappy clean and light.
If ya got the money or know-how to do it cheap, a NAS is handy for stuff you need to access from anything (Inc phone) likes films and music. I donât have one, I just use a portable USB drive plugged into my router. This isnât good for disk life I assume? but it was free and I keep it backed up with rsync.
I helped a few people do this kind of sorting out cause I find it fun fyi D: Round up everything and stuck in a folder. Then sort by file kind and put things in folders based on that.
yeah i would say a nas (even if itâs just an old pc with a debian stable install or something) is essential if you have a lot of stuff
re: organisation though, whatever works for you innit, this is a very personal thing!!! all of my computers are a total mess and i rely on spotlight/search
yeah i would use bsd + zfs ideally, âan old pc with debian stableâ immediately came to mind because thatâs my pseudo-nas, with low ram and not that much storage on ext3