Comment by QuantumNomad_

On the other end of the spectrum you have me, who’s been only vaguely organising my files for years. I am currently collecting my data from across different hard drives I have and running hashdeep as a first step to identify duplicate files. Even though I’m not organising the files themselves well, I do maintain backups. Both in the form of ones that are replicated ZFS snapshots, but also files that I’ve manually copied between drives and computers.

The amount of data has grown to too many TB now, so deduplicating things is the first step of cleaning up.

It remains to be seen if the reorganised files will be a sane and measured thing, or if I will go too far in the other direction and create a way too elaborate system of organization for my files.

I have been toying with the idea that since I am currently using hashdeep to get file hashes of all paths on different drives, I could collect all the files organized purely by hash in terms of paths on the file systems, and keep the hashdeep records for future reference, imported into queryable DuckDB databases to help me find related files etc. (For example, to find back to which other files were once under some given directory path.)

Blob storage basically. Perhaps something along the lines of Perkeep (formerly Camlistore) https://perkeep.org/

But I would really like to also do an effort of having the data organized in a way that makes it easy to determine which files I need more copies of (favorite photos of important moments, etc) and which ones I need fewer copies of (random screenshots of games, etc), and which files I can discard completely.

What do y’all do to organize all of your files? And how much data do you guys have that you consider important for the rest of your life?