....Or is it just me?

I never know how to organize my directory tree on my personal computer!

I was wondering if anybody knew of any guidelines to follow or what everybody else does.

If I'm not alone in this, I'll post examples...otherwise you can all have a good laugh...

-Addusin

No, I have the worst time finding folders that I'm looking for etc. You see this massive list and the only thing distuinguishing them is text, it takes forever to find the folder you want....

I really haven't found a solid solution other than trying to make it so everything I wanted was grouped. There MAY be a windows modding program that would let you change the icons of various folders, but I don't know if this works in the directory tree... Folder modding works for me most times though.

No, I have the worst time finding folders that I'm looking for etc. You see this massive list and the only thing distuinguishing them is text, it takes forever to find the folder you want....

I really haven't found a solid solution other than trying to make it so everything I wanted was grouped. There MAY be a windows modding program that would let you change the icons of various folders, but I don't know if this works in the directory tree... Folder modding works for me most times though.

Wow...I have the exact opposite. I cannot stand that massive list of folders...gives me a headache and lowers my motivation to zero. I need to constantly add subdirectories but if you go beyond eight, then my backup program (Roxio) refuses to touch it. :mad:

Of course that way it's harder to even see the folders that you have.

I was thinking of installing a knowledgebase but I don't know how easy they are to use or back up.

What does everyone else do?

BTW, I don't know what folder modding means (google did not help)

Thanks!

My directory trees are an absolute mess.

On my linux installations, my home directory becomes a mess very quickly. It's filled with temporary files with meaningless names, such as test.txt, out.txt, test.cpp, test.pl, etc. When I reinstall my linux system every once in a while, I will take my old home directory and place it's contents into a directory called OldRoot (placing that dir under my new home directory). So, I have several levels deep of old files (/home/xxxx/OldRoot/OldRoot/OldRoot/...). I also have another hard drive, mounted as /osys, which has /osys/home/xxxxx/OldRoot/OldRoot/... At least the mess is usually confined to my home dir, though.

On windows installs, my desktop is filled with irrelavent icons (text files, images, etc.), and the root directory of my system drive is cluttered as well. And because I run cygwin on my windows installs, I have the same problem on the windows machines as I do on the linux machines. My cygwin home dir is clogged as well, often with useless test scripts, etc.

I have been improving though... My default download directory is a temporary dir (usually named c:\temp or ~/Incoming), and it is there under the assumption that anything placed in it is not important. The same goes for compiling programs. My critical files are saved to another computer, which has three hard drives in a raid-0 config (mirroring). The directory tree on that is fairly organized, but that's only because it was planned out from the beginning (after a lot of thought of the types of files I work with or download). I also do not have the impulse to save to the network share by default, so the mess tends to stay on my local system, and files on the network share are explicitly placed there (not my work area). This also reduces duplication (which happens easily if one runs more than one operating system).

I rarely back up because I rarely remember to do so. Maybe I just rely on having 10 copies of each file scattered throughout my systems.... Or maybe I am just hoping to lose everything so I can start with a clean slate...

BTW, it's nice to have your disks indexed (through the Microsoft Indexing Service or through slocate). That way, when you perform a search on your drive, it doesn't take long to find the results. I believe that it is turned on by default in Windows XP, but I'm not sure.

For windows: I've found that Google Desktop (or it's Yahoo look-a-like) are great for finding a file you need quickly. By folder modding, I simply meant that you can change it so the icons for different folder look different.

Sub directories work too.

Does anyone remember Windows 3.1? My favorite think to do was to arrange and rearrange the File Manager. (I'm also very OCD.)

Windows 98 was pretty intuitive, but when I first met Windows XP I did not like its file arrangement.
Its sort of like a map of the spherical world peeled and pinned flat.

But I'm used to it now--probably because I like to move files around, and, yes, I too have folders of really old files. Every now and then I open them and save them in the latest wordprocessing program so they will be readable in the future.

I had a Mac at work for 4 years and could never wrap my mind around its file system. Very frustrating.

Anyway, I just wanted to suggest using the Search command to locate files. It's the best part of Windows XP, because you can search for "a word or phrase in a file." You might have to poke around in the Start \ Search \ All Files and Folders to locate that option. Then just think of a really unique phrase in that document and *ding* there's your file.

Can't relate my directories are probably the most organised things in my life.

I find it the easiest thing in the world, I just use it as a hierachy and work down the branches like a tree

Though I find it better to partition my hard drive and have different drives for different things, though im a pretty hardcore computer user, with linux partitions etc too