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OK, what is the BEST way to organise your files and folders on your PC?

Blent

Blent

Member
Oct 26, 2017
5,172
East Midlands, England, UK
So I'm in the office for the first day back at work for the New Year. I thought I'd start off by looking at all my files on my work PC, delete all the unnecessary crap and sort out the rest of them into good organised folders.

Because I do a lot of work using online services which I then download onto my PC, my computer's Downloads folder (Windows) has effectively become my main workstation. Since I started this job in June, I now have 500 individual files and items in this one folder.

I have everything 'grouped' into file type and sorted by date, so if I need a certain PDF, for example, I look at the top of the folder where the newest ones saved are at the top and the oldest are at the bottom. If I need a PNG, I scroll down to the bottom of the window.

xgMVhXh.png


This is useful for getting files I need quickly, but man does it still look messy when I expand all these categories and have 500 icons staring me in the face.

I've started trying to organise everything into the Libraries folders – documents and work stuff in 'Documents', all image files in 'Pictures', etc – but I've created so many folders that I think that by the time I've sorted everything out into suitable folders it'll take me so much time to navigate to the files I need that it's actually going to make me less productive in the long term!

What's the best way for you to sort out your files? Do you have everything in one big folder for easy access, or do you meticulously file everything away into a carefully curated folder structure?
 
Dest

Dest

Has seen more 10s than EA ever will
Coward
Jun 4, 2018
14,039
Work
You don't. After years of trying, the more you have the less organized it all becomes but the more you personally learn where everything is. 18TB across like 7 different drives... My life is suffering my organization is pain.
 
Snazz

Snazz

Banned
Nov 27, 2018
342
I just make sure I date everything.

Like this morning I created a 2019 folder, and inside that there's a folder called 01 January and next month I'll create 02 February etc.

Then in my filenames I'll save my documents something like 2019 02 01 Diabetes AGENDA and 2018 12 21 Diabetes MINUTES etc.

All easy to order and identify.
 
BDS

BDS

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
13,845
I have an SSD where I store documents and other things, and the documents are stored in folders with specific labels. My schoolwork is all in a series of subfolders named after the school and semester, so I have all my schoolwork dating back to middle school preserved. On my HDD, I have my movies and TV shows stored in folders based on franchise or show, with subfolders for individual seasons. I'm a pretty organized person in general.
 
Robin

Robin

Restless Insomniac
Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,502
I have three hard drives, the first hard drive has the operating system installed as well as vital programs. It also has a picture folder with personal photos, my art portfolio, and downloaded images. The art portfolio is organized by year and project. Second hard drive is all video games and programs. Third hard drive is the Plex server.
 
JosephMichael

JosephMichael

The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
212
Will be refreshing this thread all day for ideas..

I specifically have really gotten into photography this past year and need a way to start organizing my photos efficiently.

Last year I just made a folder called 2018 and put sub-folders in there for all my events > "Fourth of July", "Concert X,Y,Z", etc.. but something tells me there's a more organized way of doing things with photos.
 
MikeProtagonist

MikeProtagonist

Member
Oct 26, 2017
7,303
I'll never ever give up folders. They're trying to make us use as keyword filing system at work and it's always a mess because people don't assign keywords properly.

Start out basic: documents, pictures, music. Then add subfolders for major types, like in pictures I have "my art" and "photos" and "game pictures". Then add further folders for various types.

One useful thing is placing an "old" folder in any work folder. There you place all backups and saves you do along the way and keep just the finished version in the actual folder.

I recently made subfolders for my finished art sorted by year, but it's not really a good idea. When I want to look up a certain picture, I must first remember when I made it. For photos, I tend to make folders by subject, like "trips" and then further subfolders like "Prague 2010". Then inside that folder I may have another subsolder to stow away the bad pictures and only keep the good ones.
 

Deleted member 22651

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
122
Folder structure will depend on the nature of your work. You can even keep all the files in the same folder as long as they are tagged correctly. There is no universal answer.

What helped me at being organised was, first, establishing a strict and universal nomenclature for every file, something like - 20190102-Sales_Report_December2018.pdf - and, second, adopting a To Do application to manage my projects.

Every time time I have a new task I will add it to the app and link all the important documents to it. If I need to revise some of the documents later on I just look for them in my Completed Projects/Tasks.
 
dreams

dreams

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,793
A great organizational structure for me is an absolute must at work. My last job I worked as an assistant for three different executives, so I hate a top level folder for each one, and then within each of those, I'd have folders like Travel, Expenses, Org Charts, Meetings, etc. Then within each of those I'd put a year folder and then a month folder within each year folder. This made it pretty easy to find things if I searched within Outlook for an email about idk a trip and the email said the trip took place January 21, 2017. I could just go executive name > Travel > 2017 > January > whatever thing I was looking for.

So I guess my advice would be to think of the really important top level folders you need, and then from there, think of a way to structure your subfolders that makes sense for how you work. I have to say that making the year folder within the first main folder helped a LOT with visual clutter, because before I switched to that method, I just had everything within month folders, and then I'd have so much stuff in there from different years it would be a mess.
 
ConanEd

ConanEd

Alt account
Banned
Dec 27, 2018
1,033
NAS >
>Movies >
>TV Shows >
>Documentaries>
>AV>
>Other >
>>Photos>
>>Home Videos>
>>Apps>
>>Personal Files>

That about cover 95% of my stuff
 
Crispy75

Crispy75

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,054
This is like asking "what's the BEST way to lay out a house?"
There are some universal truths like "don't put everything on the desktop" or "don't put the toilet in the kitchen" but really it depends on your own needs.

At work, we use a system that goes something like

nnnn Project Name
-x.00 - Information source (ie. "1.00 Client" or "3.00 Government" or "9.00 Our Company")
--x.01,02,03,04 for the various types of information eg. letters, specifications, reports, artwork, drawings etc.
---subfolders by date/type if needed

That's at a business with 100s of projects.

With such a system, it's important to file things when they arrive. So the Downloads folder method would be no good, especially if you're in some sort of shared environment where other people might need to refer to the same information. It really becomes apparent when you're referring back to a project years later and all your working memory of events is wiped. The folder structure does the recall work for you.
 
borghe

borghe

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,112
my answer? don't.

search and indexing features of any modern OS are thorough and fast enough that any time you spend organizing files is defeated by search still being able to find, access and open your files faster than you can, even with the "best" organization.

it's even MORE silly than organizing your email.... which is already ridiculously silly.

as just one example... why would I organize my photos (I mean, they are a file..). When iOS already "organizes" them based on faces, dates, locations, scenes, types, etc. All of your other files are the exact same as this.

edit - I see people are talking specifically about work.. work I do the same as outlined above. I don't. Spotlight is much faster and better at organizing my files through search than I could ever be. The ONLY place this isn't true is working on development in my team... in which case we just organize source code by common industry standards.
 
Filipus

Filipus

Prophet of Regret
Avenger
Dec 7, 2017
5,131
Truth is, the majority of the problem people have is that they think they need to save everything. Sometimes it's just easier to dump everything that is clearly not important into a random folder and have 3-4 folder of important stuff that are tidy. Buy some cloud storage and put that random folder in the cloud and you're set.

Hell, that's why people have storage places that are literally filled with trash. We always think "things will be useful later". Human nature I guess?
 
wenis

wenis

Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,105
Hide everything in sub drives and keep that desktop clean
 
Last edited:
Crispy75

Crispy75

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,054
borghe said:
search and indexing features of any modern OS are thorough and fast enough that any time you spend organizing files is defeated by search still being able to find, access and open your files faster than you can, even with the "best" organization.
[...]
work I do the same as outlined above. I don't.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This must be an opinion borne of experience of small projects/limited collaboration/heavy use of text-based file formats
Our current project folder is 375GB, 80,800 files and 6,500 folders. If I want to find something that subcontractor X sent us in 2012, I can find it in seconds, even if it's an image file called "Copy (2) of Screenshot.jpg". Likewise for things that we've sent. No need to check through anyone's email, no need to craft special search terms, just "who? what? when?" in that order.
 
entremet

entremet

You wouldn't toast a NES cartridge
Member
Oct 26, 2017
60,010
At work? I used Evernote. You can use OneNote too if your work supports it. Just way better searching and a much more intuitive model than file folders, which are archaic as heck.

I throw everything in a place where I can search it.

One Mac, I just use Spotlight. It finds everything.

The file folder paradigm makes no sense anymore.
 
LL_Decitrig

LL_Decitrig

User-Requested Ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
10,334
Sunderland
I never understand why this is such a problem. Have a projects folder and create a subfolder for each project. For files that are of more general use, file them under your Documents folder if they're human-readable, and create a new folder called Library for reference data files.

Don't be scared to create a deep hierarchy. The key here is to have a regular, predictable pattern under your projects subfolders. So for the source code of a project named Apples I'd know to look inside the folder ~/Projects/Apples/Source, for the test suite for a project called Oranges I'd look inside ~/Projects/Oranges/Tests. I'd file my London Underground maps under ~/Documents/Travel and a file that provides necessary input data for both projects Apples and Oranges would go into ~/Library/Inputs.

After years of this kind of organisation, it's second nature. I never forget where a file is or where it should go.
 
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