Storage overload--it's a losing battle

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It's really simply...

Listen, I've read a zillion articles about this, and all of my friends and family have this problem, yet I don't.

Take a look at the hard drive context. You have directories and you have files. The drive (when I say "drive", I mean any storage device) is acts as a filing cabinet, and the directories act like file folders, and the files act like pieces of paper. Windows and MacOS even call directories "folders" now and make your directories look like file folders and your files look like pieces of paper.

Organise your stuff the same way that you'd organise paper, that's all there is to it.

If you let all of your mail come in and stack up in a pile, of course you won't be able to find the bills that are due. If you just take your tax returns and throw them in whatever folder is in the front of the cabinet, you'll be out of luck when you get audited.

I'm sorry if people are unable to do this, but I don't know anyone who needs a fancy system for organizing their paper files, or who needs an automated system for dealing with it.

Instead, simply file stuff away *as it comes in*. Once you let yourself develop a backlog of unorganized information, you'll spend hours, if not days going through it.

Like MP3s? Do what I do. When you download it, the very first thing you do is rename the file to something that matches the naming scheme that you choose (I like artist name, a dash, song name, and any "featuring" or other special information in parentheses). If you do this, it's very simple to see if you have duplicates. All of my downloads go into the same directory (and that directory is NOT my desktop). If it's an installer, I promptly rename it from "setup.exe" to something for discriptive like "Super Notebook Setup.exe". I install it, and then move the installer into a directory just for program installers. I make heavy use of Windows' default directories; "My Documents", "My Pictures", etc. Under "My Documents", I have another directory, "Archives". Anything which I may need for future use, but don't plan on performing any further editing upon goes in here (it also allows me to use incremental backups on that directory without too much pain).

Proper file organization is not just about conveneince, either, which is a point that many people fail to understand. It's also about data security and integrity. It's much easier to craft a proper backup scheme when your files are organized correctly (for example, I do an incremental backup on my archived documents every night, and only do a full backup on them once a month because they're so static, but source code gets a full backup once a week, with a differential backup nightly). In addition, I can set my file permissions and shares to be secure yet accessable very easily, because I can do it on a directory-by-directory basis.

Accept responsibility for your problem, and learn to organize. If you treated your physical files the way you treat your computer files, I'm sure that your wife would strangle you for being so messy.

On the coder side, programmers need to accept some responsibility of their own. Why is it that every piece of software seems to want to create it's own downloads directory? There should be a single registry setting, "this is where downloaded software goes" and each program should use that as it's default. The same goes for program-specific data. Some programs like the "Application Data" directory, others like the "Local Settings" directory. The only software I ever used that put it's data in a place that made any sense at all was (beleive it or not), the video game "Max Payne". It created a directory under "My Documents" called "Max Payne Saved Games", which meant that instead of having different "player profiles" for each person that used my machine, Windows automatically kept the information separately. This was an incredibly elegant, simple, and obvious way of doing things. If more game and application developers started doing things, I'm be very happy.

Posted by: Justin James   Posted on: 03/29/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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