files

home folder

At the time of this writing, my home folder contains these folders. It hasn’t changed much in years. Sometimes I’d just rename a folder just for the kicks and incidentally also break my fragile shell scripts.

aud

a dusty corner, contains my audio projects and thus contains unfinished tracks, old Marabu compositions and instruments

dev

contains git repositories of my coding projects

docs

contains personal files, ebooks, PDFs, basically any document

garage

contains miscellanea; I also store zipped archives of old projects in here to keep dev and vis tidy

intra

contains my Intra and Log files

moodboard

contains visual inspiration from the internet for my moodboard wallpapers

pictures

contains my photography

vis

contains my art projects — animations, digital art, pixel art, unfinished icon sets and typefaces

naming

I haven’t been very consistent with naming in the past, but in recent years, I’ve grown to adopt the following:

1. As much as possible, I try to use lowercase, single-word file and folder names. This is mostly to satisfy my minimalist tendencies.
2. For artworks and other files that require chronological context, I use a YYMMDD* format for the file name. This matches the tags used in associated time-tracker entries. If I create more than one artwork in a day, I add an incremental counter to the name, like 241102-1. This is something I wish I followed since birth, as every now and then, I’d stumble upon a forgotten drawing with unhelpful metadata to determine when I made it and an even more unhelpful name.

backups

My trust in cloud storage services have dwindled significantly over the years. Nowadays, I don’t really use them to host personal files.

The laptop used to have an optical drive (remember those?) wherein now resides a secondary HDD I named Citadel. There I keep local backups of certain files from the main SSD.

Additionally, I also have a couple of external backup locations in the form of a microSD card and a USB drive encased in an old cassette.

maintenance

Regular maintenance is a must to maintain order. Having fewer files makes it a lot easier to organise so I’ve made it a weekly habit to set aside at least an hour, usually on Saturdays (hence why I decided to write about this today), to go through my computer, purge things, and organise what remains:

• Clear the downloads folder. It’ll always accumulate mishmash.
• Archive old or finished projects. Store them somewhere easily accessible if you want to refer to them now and then.
• Go through your recent screenshots and process them.
• Get rid of old ebooks, research papers, notes, and any other documents you’re sure you won’t be reading or referring to them again in the future.