HACKER Q&A
📣 furyofantares

How do you organize your personal files?


I saw a post some time ago that had some sorta wild way of organizing all their personal files. It got me very curious if others have any ways of organizing their files that work well for them but might not be obvious.

I can't remember details so might be quite wrong in my recollection, but I recall the method had a root directory with a max of 10 categories, all with a number and all-caps, something along the lines of

01-FINANCE

02-PROJECTS

03-JOBS

04-PHOTOS

...

And then each directory would have a similar organization inside it, which could go on for more levels if needed, but probably rarely gets more than a couple levels deep. It struck me as quirky and weird and also somehow there seemed to be something to it as well. I think the numerical prefix is so you can kinda remember paths to something, and so that it's not alphabetical but chronological by when you added the structure. The other comment I remember was that they capped it at 9 or 10 categories per level and forced themselves to combine things if any level was too deep.

I didn't copy it exactly but I did copy a couple components of it. #1 is to ALLCAPS the folders that are a part of this high level structural organization. Once I get to a "leaf" folder that either has files in it itself, or where its internal directory organization matters, it's no longer ALLCAPS. This makes it very obvious which folders can simply be moved around because they are a part of my personal organization, and which ones have their own internal meaning. Later on I further copied the idea of having a max of 10 folders at each ALLCAPS level of organization which has made it a lot easier to know where stuff is.


  👤 satiric Accepted Answer ✓
The method you describe sounds a lot like Johnny Decimal: https://johnnydecimal.com/

I've thought about doing this but never got around to it. I've never noticed any major inefficiencies with doing it the usual way, but I'm also not old enough to be storing 30 years of documents.

On a related note, one minor annoyance I have on Windows is all the old programs that put files that should be in %appdata% in %userprofile%\Documents instead. On Linux, it's all the programs that clutter the home folder with config files instead of using ~/.config . Sometimes you can fix this in the program's settings, but sometimes you can't and you're stuck with what the developers chose.