file management tips

Input
#1

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 doesn’t make my “archive” any less of a mess.
I have heard about software like WinDirStat, and it looks useful but I don’t 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 it’s tidy, how do I make sure it stays tidy?

halp

#2

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 you’re 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 it’s 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 i’m 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.

#3

OSes all have pretty similar home folder setups, first step is follow those! Add folders where it makes sense. EG I have a ‘projects’ folder for stuff I make.

Windows is a bit inconsistent and lots of shit gets dumped in ‘my documents’, so I don’t use that one.

If I had a desktop in addition to a lappy I’d 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 don’t have one, I just use a portable USB drive plugged into my router. This isn’t good for disk life I assume? but it was free and I keep it backed up with rsync.

#4

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.

Next is the fun part~

#5

yeah i would say a nas (even if it’s 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

#6

How’s ZFS on Debian? I’d probably go with FreeBSD for this kinda thing.

#7

yeah i would use bsd + zfs ideally, ‘an old pc with debian stable’ immediately came to mind because that’s my pseudo-nas, with low ram and not that much storage on ext3

#8

How much power does something like that use? That’s been the only thing stopping me from doing something similar–not knowing.

#9

If your drives at NTFS I like to use WizTree because it is really, really fast

ZFS works great on my Ubuntu 14.04 server. 16.04 has it natively.

Do you power like “how powerful of a computer do you need for ZFS to work well” or “how much power does a NAS draw from the wall”?

1 Like
#10

From the wall, yeah.

Don’t like wasting power living in coal land.