Document storage management

[sidewalkcynic]

I have been working on a project the past couple of years that involves the storage and retrieval of computer documents, my collection is mostly Internet pages, MP3s, PDFs, and application documents, so a megabyte of information is a large document for me. And I have partitioned my HD to handle 20 Gigabytes of this type of info, which I doubt I will ever use at that rate.

Anyway, I have some 100 Gigabytes left on my HD, and I am wondering what people do with all their HD - movies???

[Barrucadu]

Movies and music. Also, 1MB is a large MP3/PDF for you?

[cariboo]

Over the years I have accumulated about 700Gb of personal files, ebooks, ripped cd's, ripped dvd's and recorded tv shows.

15 years of email archives take up just under 5Gb by itself.

[markp1989]

most of my space goes to rips of tv shows / films / music and configuration backups.

[FuturePilot]

Music library, videos, virtual machines, personal documents, backups.

[sidewalkcynic]

I guess, I don't really know the average size of the PDFs, but by in far most of what I download and file away is less than 500 Kbs.

Okay, then how well would you rate your retrieval methods? With the entertainment stuff I imagine it's in order of title and year - good enough.

But what about science and technology information? are you able to retrieve the information by a word search, and is that efficient? You see, I have it all stored in subject categories - I go to the directory of a particular subject and I have numerous documents contained in that folder including folders of sub-topics, and so forth through a hierarchy system similar to that of the Dewey decimal, and Library of Congress classification systems. And, although it is not perfect right now and can be frustrating during retrieval, because of the changes I make every few weeks of reorganizing the sub-topics - I forget what the reorganization was.

Do you see where I am going with this? It has to do with the poorly standardized classification systems society uses.