I've taken up archiving as somethig of a hobby over the past year and with it I've noticed the way I store almost everything is woefully inadequate. It's not really that bad but I know it's a problem I need to get ahead of.

Based on my experience + google these seem like general best practices, if you have input on any of this I'd like to hear it,

-Don't rely on any external program. At any moment the project could stop being maintained and if it's closed source you're shit out of luck. Open source projects aren't as problematic, they're easier for someone to fork after the fact but that still introduces a rather large point of failure. Are they worth using? Yes, but as an additional tool, not a replacement for a proper directory strucuture. Software used for this should ideally be FOSS, widely documented, and popular with the correct crowd (that being archivists/data hoarders/pirates). Calibre is a good example. If calibre ever stopped being maintained you can be sure there'd be forks or at the very least some way to get the massive amounts of metadata out of it and into another program.

-Be platform independent. Don't store your files in some weird way that renders them unusable on other modern filesystems you might find yourself switching to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits

-Be consistent. For whatever reason I've given some of my anime the romaji title, some of it I've given the english title. This can be something of a headache when I go to check whether or not I actually have something downloaded and has led to more than its fair share of dupes. A simple folder naming convention of (japanese official name)-(common english name) for such things can go a long way towards preventing these headaches and if I search for either title it'll come up.

-Have a plan for when you have to split directories without an actual split in content. When you have thousands of files/folders in a single directory explorer loves to either slow to a crawl or just crash entirely. For things like music and books this is an easy problem to solve. Sort by the authors name first, and then group those named folders alphabetically. So you'd end up with something like: literature\books\o\osasmu-dazai\no-longer-human.epub. In the case of a book/album with multiple contributors list it under the first one to appear as they're (usually) the senior partner in the arrangement.

Splitting folders in images is... much more frustrating and problematic. The sheer quantity of images alongside no embedded tagging support make them a true nightmare to sort and it's only made worse once you have to start splitting folders up. To some extent it can be counteracted with subfolders further detailing what each image is but at a certain point that's just not feasible anymore. The only real solution seems to be simply shoving them into a new folder and dating it so you might be able to gain some intuitive sense of what's inside. So you could end up with images/whatever/2019/19.03.22-compact500/image.jpg

-Be broad first, specific later. Folder naming is the key to good organization. For example /photography/ implies quite a different set of content compared /photographs/. Photography implies some level of quality, or that they're in some way professional. Photographs removes that assumption. We want to remove as much ambiguity as possible as to where something should go, this makes it easy to sort in the first place and easier to find later. In fact within photographs I then have people/places/things. Very hard lines that aren't easy to confuse, and can then be specified further such as images/photographs/things/technology/vehicles/automobile/ford/f150/01.png. That's a lot of subfolders but it's certainly better than My Pictures/cars.

So, how do you guys do it? I'm particularly interested in your solutions to sorting pictures as they're the nastiest little buggers to pin down and the only thing left I'm having real trouble with.

>>1810
For reference here's my artwork folder (my plans for it anyways) in more detail. It's basically the same story in photographs with a handful of folders removed and added. There'll be more I'll have to make as I go, but this seems like a good start.

I'm at something of a loss as to how to sort fanart in particular. It's difficult to create a copy/pastable folder structure that works for every series. It's all too easy for one or two folders to become saturated with all the content while the others sit empty. Kind of kills the point. For this reason I think it might be best to only bother sorting series with a lot of art into further folders, and only sort by character when the series has a ton of characters like Touhou.

I've seen people mention HydrusNetwork before but that doesn't seem like a real option. It'd just take too much time. There's the big upfront cost of tagging all my existing pictures and then there's the ongoing grind of tagging everything new. I love the idea of a desktop booru but unless it's going to find some way to crowdsource the work it's just not worth it.

How do you do it anon? I'm curious.

I keep maybe 1/4th of my animu photos sorted by series. In some cases I have special sub folders for characters such as the waifu, saber, ect. the rest get tossed into a big general folder that I keep telling myself I'll sort out someday knowing full well I never will.

My audio is a bit better sorted. It's not ideal but I have a music folder, and from there groups/artists. few exceptions being folders for game music, soundtrack stuff, ect I do have a small general folder of sorts for music but that's just from when my only hdd died and I had to rip my music off my ipod, and because of how poorly it was stored the files were given randomized names and placed in random folders.

Videos is pretty straightforward. anime/tv/movies/other. sub folders with series names.

Games is also pretty simple. It's mostly just sorted by system.

For pictures, I keep everything in one big "Pictures" folder. I rely on remembering when I save things and hopefully naming things properly to find them. For anime, movies, music, etc. I make folders and keep filling them until about 50 or so are in there and make a new one. I also rely on remembering when I saved things to remember where they are in this case. When I sort pictures by anime series or origin I feel like it makes it a lot harder to find. I did this once a few years back to my whole pictures folder, and later dumped everything back into one folder. Took a really long time too, not worth it, long as I can sort by modify date I'm good.

Post edited on 24th Mar 2019, 9:26pm

I mostly sort my files in videos, pictures, documents, music, games.
In pictures and videos, files are categorized as board and non-board names ex. g, b, a/[serie]/[char], Art. there are videos in pictures tough, mostly webms.

Overall it's still a big mess, some loose files, duplicate files, wrongly saved. Then there's also the issue of files that fit within multiple categories, files on other drives yet to be merged and not having the same organization. Windows doesn't allow paths with more than 256 characters so long filenames causes a problem, a temporary solution is zipping the file so it can be moved or using Teracopy.

Hydrus as >>1810 mentioned before is a solution to file organization, but it requires all the files in one big folder, I don't want to lose my folder structure so Hydrus won't be used. some images can get tags automatically by looking at MD5 of your picture and those on x-booru.

One program that's been helpful is Everything, say you save a file, put some tags in filename it's easy to find back and it's MUCH faster default windows search.

Do you guys find saving annoying too? Depending on the content I might have to jump to many different locations for each file. now THIS is a hassle. Maybe one big folder is not so bad after all?

>>1839
I have all my programs set to automatically download into one one big ingress folder and then organize from there. It's ugly but it's easier so long as you keep on top of shoving things into their appropriate places every few days. One trick is using temporary folders to group items as they come in. Say you're saving Touhou fanart. Clear out the base of ingress so only folders remain and let them all save there. Then when you finish drag them into a new folder so they don't mix with anything else. Even if you want to sort further (by character) it's still much easier than having to sit there and separate hundreds of pictures based on series which I find is usually the slowest part. And you can make other groups too like funny, infograph, etc depending on your needs and what you're saving.