How do you organize your douments, images, photos, etc ?

[samalex]

We've just ordered a new iMac and my wife and I plan on dumping all our documents, photos, music, etc from our laptops onto the desktop so we have everything in one place. But with this I need to come-up with some logical way to keep track of everything since it's lots of stuff... personal stuff, work stuff, tax info, family pics and movies, music, various word processing and spreadsheet documents, scanned documents, etc.

So just curious, how do you guys organize your stuff so it doesn't get too out of hand because I'm sure many of you are like us where we have well over a decade worth of digital content.

[leviathan8]

I keep in my home folder the little things, like pictures, videos, music, documents and downloads.
For large collections of stuff, I have special partitions for the following:

Music
Pictures
Applications (well, it's kind of obsolete for now, as I no longer have to download huge programs for windows, as I'm not using it anymore)
Games (I rarely boot into windows to play something)
Videos
Backup and Documents

[oldsoundguy]

Not much in the way of document creating here .. when one is retired .. not the need.
Separate drives (4 of them) for music files a couple of terra bytes worth).
Another separate dive for video being held for burning (concert footage mostly.)
Another separate drive for my photos/photo work.
Most of the drives are on other computers and networked. (in order to keep the clutter to a minimum whenever possible.)

[Copper Bezel]

One thing I've found useful is aggressive use of symlinks. Using them as shortcuts, you can organize all your data by logical classification, then create a separate organization around how you actually find yourself interacting with the information (so that, for instance, the handouts and information for my current classes are way down in a directory structure under Documents along with previous years', but the present semester is backed up via Dropbox and immediately accessible from my catchall folder.) That way, too, you can pull in different elements of the same project and copy that whole spidery creature off if you need to port it somewhere, all without breaking the rules of your "real" organization method.

[aG93IGRvIGkgdWJ1bnR1Pw==]

Classic folders (documents, music, images, videos etc). Everything is replicated on my desktop, homeserver and two laptops, and kept in sync with a few rsync scripts I put together. I store regular backups (tarred and ccrypted) once every other week.

[wojox]

I put everything on CD or USB. If it's real old like tax info from years past I create a compressed package.

The magnetic platters on a hard drive don't last forever. ;)

[gsmanners]

The magnetic platters on a hard drive don't last forever. ;)

What's more likely to happen is that the read/write heads on the hard drive start to skew to the point where the data becomes unreadable or the heads rip right off and start trashing the platters.

[jmore9]

I stick everything in one huge folder then cuss like crazy when i cannot find what i am looking for. :)

I also back my files but not the os.

I make a aptoncd of installs and updates and keep that with the os install disk.

[wojox]

What's more likely to happen is that the read/write heads on the hard drive start to skew to the point where the data becomes unreadable or the heads rip right off and start trashing the platters.

That must sound wonderful. :P