Organizing Your Hard Drive
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I've been meaning to organize my hdd, but it seems like the main point of that is to know where to find files and for that I just use Everything Search Engine[^]
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I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
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I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
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- System drive for OS and programs (SSD - 1 TB) - Working drive for stuff I'm working on (WD Black - 2 TB) - Backup and Storage drive to back up the stuff I'm working on, archiving, saving downloads, etc (WD Black - 4 TB).
Very good choice! I go there a step further ... * C: - SSD 0,5 TB System drive for OS and programs with ntfs links to other HDs. * D: - WD Blue 1 TB Data drive for stuff, like documents, projects, source code, etc. * E: - WD Blue 1 TB Work ground used by stuff I'm working on, like run/debeg project softwar (without source codes) and for databases, web server, VMs. * F: - WD Blue 1 TB Mainly for outsourcing of some SSD places like, like Temp, etc., to protect / increase the lifetime of the SSD. The rest of it I use for work and editing of multimedia files, and for extremely large amounts of data in DBs. * Backup, archiving, saving downloads, etc., all go to server shares on the network .
Something about which we often break our head: "In the name of the Compiler, the Stack, and the Bug-Free Code. Amen." (source unknown)
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I've been meaning to organize my hdd, but it seems like the main point of that is to know where to find files and for that I just use Everything Search Engine[^]
Ditto on the directory organization ... but I use Copernic Desktop Search (http://copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/). It has good file previews. It is most useful for finding code I've written before in previous applications. Search, preview in CDS and copy/paste if you need to. It's not free, but it's not expensive.
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I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
I mostly go with OS/Installer defaults. It's less painful than trying to fight the system. The only major exception is that about two years ago at work I created `C:\Program Fails\` as a cesspit to keep penguin droppings from fouling my root folder any more.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Ditto on the directory organization ... but I use Copernic Desktop Search (http://copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/). It has good file previews. It is most useful for finding code I've written before in previous applications. Search, preview in CDS and copy/paste if you need to. It's not free, but it's not expensive.
Thx, it looks useful. The one area where Everything is lacking is that it doesn't look inside files like Copernic can. For finding previous code Visual Studio's search (shift+ctrl+f and setting the options for directory and file type) works pretty well.
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I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
Similar to others, but with extra partitions: C: SSD with OS and apps Data on mirrored HDDs, partitioned as: D: Data; includes "My Documents" (location moved) and data like Quicken, spreadsheets, dev stuff, etc. E: Download; legacy, but I've kept it. Drivers, software updates, useful apps M: Media; My Pictures/Music/Videos. Largest of the partitions, naturally Backup for D: is twice/day (incremental), D/E/M each week. Use both external USB and NAS (with mirrored 2TB drives). Replace the HDDs at least every 3 years. As for organization of folders, definitely a personal preference, BUT I tend to organize with major folders such that location + file name generate meaning. Example: file named "Minutes 1-1-16" in subfolder "Team Meetings" in folder "Dev Project X". Sometimes OCD works to your advantage.
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I've been using that for many months, and find it an invaluable tool. The initial indexing does take a few minutes, but then I have 172,053 folders and 4,466,927 files on my disk. Once the indexing is done, even wildcard search is almost instant. Just to make a point, I've used Windows Explorer to try and find those numbers, but at the time I'm writing this it's only halfway done counting, whereas Everything (which I started later) has long finished indexing, creating the searchable database, and providing the results. P.S.: Windows Explorer eventually finished, but for some reason it only displays 170,071 folders and 4,494,444 files - I have no idea why it's missing some 2000 folders and more than 170,000 files :wtf:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
'Sbeen a few hours since I downloaded this ... a few less since I uninstalled it after an install. Did accepting the default settings make an "OK" button visible in that sparse GUI window you get before your uninstall or did you just know intuitively to wait for some asylum tokens to come down the pike in the form of normal GUI things like ... buttons .. to appear? I might try to reinstall this. 'All depends.
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Thx, it looks useful. The one area where Everything is lacking is that it doesn't look inside files like Copernic can. For finding previous code Visual Studio's search (shift+ctrl+f and setting the options for directory and file type) works pretty well.
More often I'm using Visual Prolog (Visual Prolog Features[^]), which doesn't have that capability.
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I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
X is drive letter of choice... I install games in X:\Games Compiler stuff in X:\Compiler Code projects in X:\Compiler\Projects\ Music in X:\Music\Midi (look up Timbres of Heaven 3!), X:\Music\MP3, X:\Music\Videos, etc I keep misc files (utilities, patches, etc) in X:\Misc\Util, X:\Misc\Patches, etc I manually organize my start menu (by dragging stuff around, creating new folders, etc) in:
Compiler Games --\Action --\RPGs --\Strategy --\Simulation Hardware // (burning programs, gfx or audio drivers, etc) Internet --\Email --\Browsers Maintenance // (virus scanner, system tools, ccleaner, etc) Office & Media --\Office --\Players --\Editors Utilities // (classic shell, archive programs, etc) (plus the standard windows entries)I never allow rogue shortcuts to stay around without moving them into the appropriate place. Also use Windows Classic Shell, which allows me to have the expanding start menu. Can't stand the all-in-one column approach that has been the norm for so long. -
I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
just do as my wife does... put EVERYTHING on the desktop.
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I've been using that for many months, and find it an invaluable tool. The initial indexing does take a few minutes, but then I have 172,053 folders and 4,466,927 files on my disk. Once the indexing is done, even wildcard search is almost instant. Just to make a point, I've used Windows Explorer to try and find those numbers, but at the time I'm writing this it's only halfway done counting, whereas Everything (which I started later) has long finished indexing, creating the searchable database, and providing the results. P.S.: Windows Explorer eventually finished, but for some reason it only displays 170,071 folders and 4,494,444 files - I have no idea why it's missing some 2000 folders and more than 170,000 files :wtf:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
Not only that,,,, But,,,, **The Author Responded To A Question From Me !!!** I put up a question, something like, "...*Do you suggest the x64 or the x86 version for a machine with blah-blah-blah ?*..." with my E-mail address, on his "*contact us*" page. A few hours later I saw an answer, equally simple, one line, x86 for performance unless your tree is super huge; or something like that.
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Similar to others, but with extra partitions: C: SSD with OS and apps Data on mirrored HDDs, partitioned as: D: Data; includes "My Documents" (location moved) and data like Quicken, spreadsheets, dev stuff, etc. E: Download; legacy, but I've kept it. Drivers, software updates, useful apps M: Media; My Pictures/Music/Videos. Largest of the partitions, naturally Backup for D: is twice/day (incremental), D/E/M each week. Use both external USB and NAS (with mirrored 2TB drives). Replace the HDDs at least every 3 years. As for organization of folders, definitely a personal preference, BUT I tend to organize with major folders such that location + file name generate meaning. Example: file named "Minutes 1-1-16" in subfolder "Team Meetings" in folder "Dev Project X". Sometimes OCD works to your advantage.
Earth16 wrote:
Sometimes OCD works to your advantage.
**OCD: (acronym) "Organized Character Development"** The slobs and careless persons of the world became so distressed by the presence of normal people that they infiltrated the psychology textbooks, found the 0.001 percent of society who took things too far, and now assign the exact same acronym as a mental disorder in an attempt to ameliorate their severe shame and deflect attention away from their disorganized life, habits, living quarters, and hard drives.
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I just did a search for "Organizing Your Hard Drive" on this site (using two or three different phrases) and found nothing, so I thought I would ask. Pre-Question before the main question: Did I miss the obvious ? Is there a topic or group for this already ? If so, please point me. Main question: How do **you** arrange **your** hard drive ? I just don't like the way mine has evolved into such an obfuscated convolution of DISorganization. My not-so-perfect inventory of my drive shows me... ````````````` - Folders: 116,354 - Files: 620,448 ````````````` ...which is plenty good enough for our purposes here. That's an average of 5 or 6 files per folder, which is an absolutely inaccurate way of understanding the numbers. The arithmetic average is by no means truly "*average*" as we humans understand the word. I want to start a couple of home study courses, and I have this belief that my disorganized hard drive is going to thwart all efforts before I begin the first one. Conversely, I have a sincere belief that an organized drive would significantly enhance and greatly increase my ability to absorb the knowledge that I'm trying to acquire. So I'm up for suggestions and ideas on how other people have approached this.
I do this: C: (RAID SSD) D: (RAID SSD) E: (RAID SSD) F: through Z: Everything else is on Network NAS I: Installation software (ISO's etc.) L: Downloads M: Music (FLAC) N: Music (iTunes) P: Photos V: Videos T: The Wifes Drive... :) You gotta do it... S: System Backups etc. X: :) The important bit for C: D: and E: in my case is the RAID, One of my C:'s failed the other day... :( but I was able to continue working with no problems...just replaced the disk and that was it. Also OK for performance. I also have a couple of BitLocker Drives on S: for stuff that is more secure, license codes, copies of important documents etc... Hope it helps regards
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'Sbeen a few hours since I downloaded this ... a few less since I uninstalled it after an install. Did accepting the default settings make an "OK" button visible in that sparse GUI window you get before your uninstall or did you just know intuitively to wait for some asylum tokens to come down the pike in the form of normal GUI things like ... buttons .. to appear? I might try to reinstall this. 'All depends.
There are no buttons, only a menu bar at the top. It is what it is: a file search window, so all it really needs is the text field to enter the (partial) file name you're looking for (it is located directly below the menu bar), and the result list, which fills up once it's done indexing. There is no need to [start] the search - it starts instantly (showing the full file and folder list), and corrects the result list with every single letter you enter in the search box.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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I've been meaning to organize my hdd, but it seems like the main point of that is to know where to find files and for that I just use Everything Search Engine[^]
As a long term user of Everything, it helps finding things very quickly. I've installed it on most customer machines. Even for things you know exactly where they are, most of the time it is quicker to open Everything and type a couple of chars instead of clicking through a deep hierarchy. But Everything still does not organize the disk which was the request of this thread. It just takes the urge for a very strict organization upfront. From my point of view you have to take care of a few things personally: 1. Have a good naming scheme 2. Somehow group files into meaningful sections/directories. 3. Use the self-organizing file features of apps when available (iTunes etc.). 4. Avoid duplicates! 5. Throw away what you don't need. @1: This might become a problem for others. If you move such a file to a (public) server you might receive a lot of disagreement about the name. Only your brain knows what to search for. From our customer machines I know that Everything only helps to find things you know like apps. It does not help to find office documents that they have created with their own naming scheme. @2: This was the original question. No general solution! But you can reorganize all sections anytime according to it's growth: Everything helps to keep track finding this after a reorg. Also deep hierarchies are no problem because you have direct access to the file via Everything. @4: Using this feature, a whole directory tree is hidden by the app and you don't have to take care of organizing that part. @3: The more often you use Everything, the more you will find duplicates. Act immediately on those, otherwise the search returns more & more results over time and you still have to open these files and find the one you are looking for. @5: Unneeded files are cluttering your search results. If you are a "collector" and don't want to delete them just put them in a .zip file. The biggest disadvantage of Everything is that it is normally not available on file servers. Once you get used to use it all the time, a file server appears to you as a monolithic block which takes a lot of effort to browse. Finally there is "WinDirStat[^]" whi
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As a long term user of Everything, it helps finding things very quickly. I've installed it on most customer machines. Even for things you know exactly where they are, most of the time it is quicker to open Everything and type a couple of chars instead of clicking through a deep hierarchy. But Everything still does not organize the disk which was the request of this thread. It just takes the urge for a very strict organization upfront. From my point of view you have to take care of a few things personally: 1. Have a good naming scheme 2. Somehow group files into meaningful sections/directories. 3. Use the self-organizing file features of apps when available (iTunes etc.). 4. Avoid duplicates! 5. Throw away what you don't need. @1: This might become a problem for others. If you move such a file to a (public) server you might receive a lot of disagreement about the name. Only your brain knows what to search for. From our customer machines I know that Everything only helps to find things you know like apps. It does not help to find office documents that they have created with their own naming scheme. @2: This was the original question. No general solution! But you can reorganize all sections anytime according to it's growth: Everything helps to keep track finding this after a reorg. Also deep hierarchies are no problem because you have direct access to the file via Everything. @4: Using this feature, a whole directory tree is hidden by the app and you don't have to take care of organizing that part. @3: The more often you use Everything, the more you will find duplicates. Act immediately on those, otherwise the search returns more & more results over time and you still have to open these files and find the one you are looking for. @5: Unneeded files are cluttering your search results. If you are a "collector" and don't want to delete them just put them in a .zip file. The biggest disadvantage of Everything is that it is normally not available on file servers. Once you get used to use it all the time, a file server appears to you as a monolithic block which takes a lot of effort to browse. Finally there is "WinDirStat[^]" whi
Christian Scholze wrote:
It does not help to find office documents that they have created with their own naming scheme.
Whahuh!!!???? dir /s c:\*.exe ... I'm glad a user took the time to add some useful comments to this thread. I installed this thing when I started reading about organizing something everyone has but KNOWS is quite the nebulous thing. The hard drive. And with the influx of hand-held device thumbizan posters now, that nebulosity has spiked to such a magnitude I'm no longer willing to waste my time responding to ... Doctor Who ... because he's always out of aspect. Oh yeah. And quickly uninstalled it. I found unticking all options, waiting for completion, then first time startup, gave me this GUI with no recourse to any control at all. So I ditched it right then and there. My experience with the Windows Search and it's indexer, ever since that beautiful HTML helpfile that allowed me to search-in-find-set was deep-sixed, the whole idiom fell into the abyss where that bridge out never materialized. So third-party pay-through-the-nose is the only way to get any work done.
Christian Scholze wrote:
with their own naming scheme
(I suppose I didn't wait long enough for the "app" to finish indexeing)