Comment by hardwaresofton
4 years ago
I see and applaud your use of the underscore there, but I must reject the premise!
work/client/project/2021-11-11-file.ext is more or less how I lay stuff out. I’d say client/project is a folder level distinction (arguably dates too).
[EDIT] Realistically most of the stuff under <project> is git repos and I usually make a “home” repo where I keep org files for tracking hours, notes, and resources related to the engagement.
I'll be the opposite voice: the file system isn't for precise organisation, it's just for storing. For organisation, the ideal thing to use is tags. Since most file systems don't have tags and using software for that would be a pain, the best way to do this is to list the tags in the file name.
I've always thought that personal files, photos, or any other kind of just needed more connections between them to improve my information retrieval experience. That's how I had become a Zettelkasten evangelist. I believed it would be the cure for the information overload disease of our era.
But life made me use Emacs org-mode more and more, and I'm now in love with tags. Retrieving information has become so easy, especially with org-mode's tags inheritance, that I hardly think making connections between headings or notes is necessary anymore[1]. And I believe that applying tags to filenames (a la Karl Voit [2]) will create the same effect
[1] A Zettelkasten-like system is still unbeatable imo when it comes to ideas repositories, i.e. a second brain you can talk to and get new insights. It's just not that great for personal knowledge management or project management.
[2] https://github.com/novoid/filetags
work/client/project/2021-11-11-file.ext is great until you've got a '2021-11-11-project-status.txt' in a few directories and you need to find one quickly! I do a combination: clients/client/project/2021-11-11-client-project-update.txt
It sounds like what everyone in this thread needs is a database file system. This was always my favorite proposed feature of Windows Longhorn that never made the cut. Almost 2 decades later and Microsoft's latest OS still doesn't have this feature.
I wrote about what I perceived as deficiencies of hierarchical file systems, and proposed an alternative organization based on tags and hashes. It was discussed on Hacker News last week and many years ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141800
Have you used BeOS?
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I just store it as a content hash and then when I want to find the file, I just have to recreate its content and I can then just get the hash.