Thursday, March 31, 2011

Organization Help

From grade school, I am familiar with the Dewey Decimal System way to classify books in the library.



I am aware of, though not familiar with, the Library of Congress, which has it's own catalog system for books.



And in the world of computer file organization (which is where I'm heading with this), we have the traditional Unix/Linux style directory structure



And of course the Microsoft directory structure, which I've tried to use for years now without any real success at organization. This must come to an end.

I have half a dozen disk drives containing files, some of import, some just old backups. This happens as I change computers every couple years it seems. The old backups keep piling up. This isn't even counting the boxes of zip discs and floppy discs that I reluctantly had to throw away a few years ago.

I want to orgnaize this better. I've looked at all these aforementioned systems, and none of them seem to be the right fit for my files. The Unix/Linux might be close, but it doesn't go far enough. I'm afraid the various Library systems might me too detailed, but not sure. I would like to be given a suitable framework, and then I can move everything over. Ideas?

2 comments:

Tuttle said...

As a rule of thumb, throw out anything you haven't used in over two years.

Within two weeks after you throw it out, some situation will require that exact thing, so you'll have to recreate it from scratch.

This will waste an inordinate amount of time, and the fisnished product probably won't be as good as what you had to begin with.

Hope that helps.

Chris said...

Spot on! Alas, I have a genetic condition, inherited from many generations of hoarders. We call it the pack-rat gene...