Data Filing Discipline

Every once in a while I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up the data stored on my hard drives along with deleting junk, uninstalling applications, moving stuff to other drives... it's endless. And every time I do this I promise myself I'll implement some sort of filing system for the data I generate or download off the internet, and every time I fail, miserably.

I've just installed a new 200Gb SATA drive for some much needed extra storage space and once again I intend to apply some sort of directory structure for the data. But what's best?

I tend to do it by application. So I'd have a Blender directory with a sub-directory structure with, for example, files, demos, movies, scripts, textures, models etc. The problem comes deciding which directory to put the data in. Does a demo file go in the demo directory or the scene file directory? and what about the models and textures contained within the file?

Or should I do it by project? But then that doesn't work with stuff I've downloaded off the net rather than personal data I've created. I know with the new desktop search services the actual location of the data is not really important, Google will find it, but I'm an old fashioned type of guy and I like to see my data in a hierarchal structure (easier to read and understand) but I'm just to lazy to keep up the discipline it requires. If I'm honest I tend to save everything to the desktop, especially downloads and then have a big clean up moving it to a more appropiate place (sometimes weeks later). Terrible pratice I know, and don't talk to me about the amount of desktop icons and shortcuts I tend to have to wade through.

Anyhoo, I've just reclaimed 18Gb of space on my c: drive (by deleting unused applications, cache files etc) and started to populate the new 200Gb drive. I give it 2 weeks before it's an un-navigatable mess and my desktop is awash with files and shortcuts.

Category:

• Computer
• Data