Depends on what it is. Currently, on my laptop, I have music organized by group followed by album if I have ripped a CD for backup in case my CD stops working. Got a lot of blanks, just in case, for free.

Downloads isn’t organized. Pictures are slightly organized, with images for background in a folder and a few other folders. Most everything in documents is in a folder inside the documents folder or a subfolder in the subfolders.

Desktop has folder has mostly the important things in it, like folder for appimages, emulators, other programs and related files that require their own folder, and a few miscellaneous files. Organization is something I have prioritized a lot more on my laptop to ensure I don’t end up having a situation like with my desktop where it’s a shitshow.

As for phone, I’m doing a lot better with organization because I set up a new phone I got maybe a month or less ago and have been doing good to organize. Just need to go into my SD card and fix some things up that haven’t been organized for a long time, since my 2nd smartphone, back from ~2015-16. Mostly just music. Got over 500 audio files stored on an SD card, so you can imagine how insane it is to try and organize, especially if you feel daunted by that task like me.

Your question made me curious, so I counted: the subdirectories in my home directory reach a maximum of 26 levels deep.

Well whenever I want to keep track of an important document, I put AAA or 000 in front of the title. And then I make several copies. And then I make multiple folders intending to organize things. And then I wind up with 30 separate docs folders yet all my documents end up in the general My Documents, Downloads, or Desktop folders instead.

I have mine set up in groups, per hard drive.

Documents is set up for projects. Downloads gets grouped every few months and turned into a backup downloads folder on the backup hard drive.

So it goes from C:/Downloads into H:/Backups/Downloads/Downloads-11-19-2024

Every other hard drive is mostly just games, so it’s set up by project and the Games with whichever launcher.

I don’t have many projects that go more than 6 folders deep, most would be 4 at most

I don’t have the energy or the patience so the *arr stack organizes everything for me automatically. Not 100 levels deep, maybe a dozen or so at most, but very clean and tidy.

I’ve gone super organized to absolute dumped folders over the last decade. If you have a NAS, get organized. Everything on your computer, do more loosely.

My rule with hobbies like electronics like PCB design prototyping and breadboarding, 3d printing, roadie bicycle stuff, etc., is that my collection of crap and organization scheme has failed when I forget what I have or can’t find it when I need it. I avoid the rabbit hole of making organization a priority project or taking it too far by only targeting what I need to do in order to prevent these situations of missing items.

The same goes for digital storage. My organization must be intuitive so that a year or more from now, I know where to find the thing at a glance.

One trick I learned from managing multiple connected point of sale systems for a chain of retail stores is to name your files in a way that sorts naturally. For instance, use year-month-day in file naming as opposed to nonsensical date standards. With bikes in the bike shops it was

• "Bike-
• MTB/RDR/TRI/HYB/KID-
• XS/SM/MD/LG/XL
• (Brand)-
• (Model)-
• (Year)"

Without a sales staff performing any searches I wanted bike types and sizes to naturally sort. I needed them to see exactly what was in stock in their store without thinking about the computer. I wanted them to immediately identify the range of choices available so that they could easily tell the customer what choices they have for immediate gratification. This involved me normalizing bike sizing to fit within my naming constraints as no bikes are sized the same way across brands. This is still how I think about naming schemes, they should always have sorting functionality built in. But don’t take it so far that you can’t remember the way you organized stuff without refamiliarizing yourself with the details.

I’ve struggled with digital organizing for decades. I tried tons of strategies from other people. There’s lots of good ideas, but ultimately you have to find something that works for you. I take some ideas from other systems and tweak them in ways that make sense for me.

I heavily rely on the default indexing of my OS. KDE is great, but most OSes have pretty good file searching tools. Just make sure to label files or at least folders in ways that are searchable.

Backups are super important (3 copies, 2 different types of media, 1 copy off site). I like to structure my data in a way that is easy to back up. I have a folder called “ephemeral” for stuff that I don’t care to back up so I don’t waste precious space. But i also try to have way more space than i need. I have a 4TB ssd on my main laptop and am planning on upgrading to 8TB soon. I have two different ZFS RAID3 arrays on my server where I copy data too. I started using syncthing to keep different types of media backed up between multiple computers. That way I can decide which computer is connected to which data set. Then I take regular backups of the sever to external drives and rotate those backup off site monthly.

I like to have a folder called “archive” where i put things that I want to hold on to, but will probably never need regular access too.

I also have a sensitive data folder for things that need to be on encrypted drives like financial statements, social security, passwords, ssh keys. Keeping it together helps me from forgetting it on an unencrypted drive. I had a laptop stolen once and it sucked not knowing what they may have pulled from it.

I have a media folder that contains folders for basic file types like documents, pictures, books, music, etc. The ephemeral folder has the same folder structure, but contains files that i don’t care if they disappear or get deleted. It is annoying to keep up with this though. But investing in storage space buys me time to not deal with it.

It will never be perfect so I learned how to stop worrying and love the search.

Downloads folder is a free-for-all; things get properly sorted when they’re moved onto the NAS - there is a seperate network drive for Multimedia (videos), Applications, Photos, etc. Each of those are then usually nested by Alphabetical folder.

I use plex so it files have to complay with the minimum plex naming conventions:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/

Organizing is one thing but it’s better to reduce your brainpower-spending regardless of what you do.

On Windows? Custom iconed folders and explorer bookmarks go a long way. Better than relying on Quick Access or whatever.

On desktop Linux? Tools like fd and zoxide (z) save you as long as your directory names are consistent. Sticking to names-like-this reduces guesswork and you can skip around in seconds. (Saved me many a due date.)

On Android, consult Indiana Jones. Your files are a treasure – they’re staying hidden

I try but don’t always succeed. In my main laptop, I have all misc files in the downloads folder, photos in photos, documents(pdfs, writer, math) and videos/movies in videos.

These days, a shallow folder system. I have an electronica folder, and a Blanck Mass folder that definitely would go in there but that is full enough to stand on it’s own. Actual taxonomic organisation would take way too many clicks, but flat organisation can result in trouble finding things, and just looks like you’re a slob. (Although I’m guilty of having unsorted hoarder folders for things I only needed once, too)

There’s probably a rule of thumb for optimal fanout on each GUI folder, related to our visual processing. Hmm. I wonder if there’s a way to make the tree self-balancing as well.

Yes.

I use this thing, I find it pretty useful

My organising system has a dual nature: it is either highly structured or a mess.

Information, such as documents, notes, spreadsheets, and images, is carefully organised into well-defined directories, no more than four or five levels deep. The destination directory is chosen at the time of download.

Anything that I expect to use more than once, even if only a few times, is dumped into a directory called GMS (Games, Movies, Software), which resides on a separate disk partition.

Everything else ends up in the Downloads directory, which is truncated every three months.