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.

Skipping non-Euclidean geometry in your renovation? Hope you’re ready for a strongly worded letter from the Azathoth HOA.

I have over 20,000 bookmarks that I saved going all the way back to the 90s. I’ve been integrating tagging ever since del.icio.us was launched.

I would love to check this out. How does this work with expired domains?

neofetch is deprecated. There are several alternatives like fastfetch.

I think you’re in the wrong classroom. Government abortion-clinic cellphone tracking software is next door.

Thank you, Ward Christensen. RIP. I was just commenting on another thread earlier today, recounting my nostalgia for dialing into a small BBS after school and talking to my friends.

I thought the same thing when I was looking at the first volume! It was a really weird time to grow up in. I was about 12-14 when my friends introduced me to BBSes. We had a main one that was really small and you could only stay online for a short period of time every day for free, so we would try to catch each other there after school. I can’t remember how many concurrent users it supported, but maybe it was 8. There were a few bigger ones we would use too after our minutes ran out. The news paper had a BBS as well that supported a lot of people, but it didn’t have fun games or other kids to talk to, so that one was boring.

There were women that used the BBS regularly. I went on a blind date with a girl at a pizza place. Her friends were there too and it was about as uncomfortable as a blind date can be. I also became friends with a girl at my school from the BBS. We talked online and realized we had some classes together. I was surprised she was into such a nerdy hobby at the time because she was a cheerleader and a “cool kid.”

The craziest BBS memory for me is that, 10 years ago, someone at my work recognized me from a BBS. A lady stopped me when I was walking to the break room and said she knew me and my friends from back in the day. I didn’t remember her or all the details of the BBSes that she was talking about, but she threw out names of a lot of people. She was one of the older teenagers that hung out online. Some of those kids would have IRL meetups at pizza places and stuff. We didn’t really interact much online with the older kids, but we knew a little bit about them and they knew about us. You definitely wanted to talk to everyone and figure out who they were and if they were someone you could be get along with. New users were exciting.

I miss that old era. I remember the day that our main BBS had a connection to “The Internet”. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. But I think it basically connected you to IRC or something similar. You could join hundreds of chat rooms and talk to so many people. It was overwhelming. Up until then, I only talked to people in my city/area code. Sometime later my family signed up for an internet provider (never AOL thankfully). There was a period of overlap where I would log into the old BBS after using up my daily minutes on my family’s dial up internet plan.

Tildes sounds intriguing. I will check it out.

I love that you have old BBS magazines. What a weird wave of nostalgia that was.

I am still running an FX-8320 and it’s fast enough for everything that I need it for. It baffles me to see people arguing about the differences between different Ryzen CPUs.

As someone who modded his controller with metal buttons. Instant regret. It is not comfortable for extended gaming sessions.

I received a chain e-mail saying that If I mail the person who sent me this $1 and forward the e-mail to all my entire contact list, I will be a millionaire. There are hundreds of email addresses in the body of this email from all the forwards that have happened before it was forwarded to me. How cool! Unrelated: how are all these spammers getting my email address? I only gave it to all my friends and family. And my friends/family only send me cool chain emails and funny jokes. e-mail is a new technology, so surly they will fix this spam problem by the year 2000.

Seriously, as an IT person, I still never know what most of my USB ports are capable of, but I’m glad they are backwards compatible. If something is slow, then I try a different cable and port.

The similarities between Happy Fun Ball and Elon’s childhood car drawing are SHOCKING (because both will likely electrocute the user)

The Itsy-Bitsy Spiderman can’t fight crime in the rain.

Sorry i didn’t mean to be ignorant. I was just using this as an opportunity to promote men carrying tampons. I guess it’s probably a good idea to provide tampons high school boys too. I didn’t think about that.

It takes longer to write that reply than it does to type “indie web kat” into a search tool. Here you go, poor soul: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rTSEr0cRJY8&pp

Many men have daughters and wives. Men need tampons. It’s a good idea to keep a tampon or two in your emergency/first aid kit.

I have a 2 TB Steam Deck running Bazzite OS. How does this impact me and my family?

Not yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss

Microsoft’s loss of cloud data for the Sidekick phone was one of the biggest disasters in cloud computing history.