What's Your Filing System? Keeping Stuff Organised

[jago25_98]

I had a fairly good backup system when I had a PC. I just backed up select things, usually photos, to an external drive.  Ideally I would then put this in a fireproof safe. 

 

These days we have a plethora of cloud storage, 2 phones, a tablet, a laptop, a PC, then maybe even work stuff. 

 

How do you guys stay organised? 

 

 

 

Personally...

When the cloud came about what I started to do was use Google Drive as a store for documents. I then started using Mega to backup photos from my phone. The easiest point from here to backup Gdrive & Mega would be to use btsync to duplicate those 2 stores... but in order to do that AFAIK I would have to bring it all to a local drive and then run btsync... but I don't have enough bandwidth and space to do this. I'm not quite sure where to go from here. 

 

The next problem I have is that I now have a few GB of photos but because they're remote and I don't have enough local storage I can't use something like Picasa to organize the files. If I go out and buy a bigger drive then I'm not sure where to host that - I travel a lot.

 

Do other people generally just sync everything except bigger files? 

Is there a standard heirachy that people use? I've noticed that some companies use

 

01 Contracts

02 Human Resources

03 Places

04 People

05 etc

 

But it's completely non standard and you can't use the keyboard to find the folder you're looking for anymore. Do you backup all the folders? Or do you leave some unbacked up, such as videos? If it's not backed up, do you mark it as such in the name? What do you sync to your phone? Or do you sync FROM your phone? Or do you backup from your phone to the cloud... or from your phone to your PC and then to the cloud. 

 

If you are a musician, how did you catagorise your sound samples? Did you put different file types together or not?

If you are a photographer, how did you organise things? By date, by subject, by contract, by place? 

 

Or do you put everything in a sequence of sequential folders and use tagging? But if you do... how does that mesh with cloud storage? 

 

Is there a procedure that you've seen work particularly well and where can I read about it? It seems like a big subject

Edited October 18, 2015 by jago25_98

[iswrong]

I am kind of messy and let OS X's Spotlight do most of the work of locating files. In general, this works better for me, because it is often more obvious what content you are looking for than which categorization you gave to it at the time. I make broad directory-based categorizations for documents and more fine-grained directory structures for photos, since they tend to be harder to search.

 

I have a desktop machine with a disk that is large enough to store all of my BTSync folders and use Arq to make encrypted off-site backups. On my laptop I use partial sync to save space. I also have two always on low-power BTSync peers with plenty of storage, but didn't have time yet to set up off-site backups on these yet (which would reduce the amount stuff needed on the aforementioned desktop).