Geek to Live: Organizing "My Documents"
by Gina Trapani
Last week we discussed how to organize your paperwork with a filing cabinet, some manila folders and a label maker. Today we're going to tackle that virtual yellow folder on your computer called "My Documents."
If your current file organization system works for you, congratulations. But if you frequently find yourself letting files clutter your computer's desktop, or if you spend time arranging files in a deep, complicated hierarchy of fine-grained folders, it's time for a revamp. Remember, with simplicity comes effortlessness. A few simple but flexible buckets can get your bits and bytes under control so you can spend less time moving files around and more time getting work done.
There are a million and one ways to arrange files and folders on disk. Some might argue that spending a moment even thinking about it in the age of desktop search is unnecessary. That may be true, but some semblance of order will clear your desktop and your mind and make you "ready for anything." Over the years I've come up with a six folder structure for "My Documents" which I create on every computer I use without fail. This scheme accommodates every file I might come across, keeps my desktop clear, smoothly fits in with an automated backup system and also makes command line file wrangling a breeze.
This is just one way that won't work for everyone, but there may be something here to help you get your digital documents under control. In alphabetical order, my six main folders are called: bak, docs, docs-archive, junkdrawer, multimedia and scripts. Here's a quick rundown of what each does and what it might contain.
- bak
I spend a lot of time at the command line, so I always opt for shortened file names. In this case, bak is short for backup - but it isn't what you think. Your data backups will reside on external disks, but the bak folder holds application-specific exported backup data. For instance, your bak folder might contain your Firefox and Thunderbird MozBackup files (you backup before you install new extensions, right?), your Quicken file backup, your Address Book exported CSV, or a dump of your weblog's database.
- docs
Docs is the big kahuna of all the six folders. It's the place where all the working files for your currently in-progress tasks, projects and clients go. Docs changes often and frequently, and should be purged often. I have many sub folders in docs, like "finance," "clients," and "creative-writing." The "clients" folder has sub folders too, like "lifehacker" and "kinja." That gets us 3 sub folders in, and that's usually as deep as I'm willing to go.
- docs-archive
Your docs file should be purged of no longer "working" files frequently. "Closed" files - on a completed project, for a former employer, for past tax years - should go into your docs-archive. This archive exists just for reference and search, but the separate folder keeps all that extra stuff from cluttering up docs, which is basically your working task dashboard. The files in docs-archive don't change much if ever, and so you can back them up on a different (less frequent) schedule as a result.
- junkdrawer
The junkdrawer (or temp, or tmp) is a temporary holding pen for files you're messing around with but don't need to save long-term. Firefox and Thunderbird should both save to junkdrawer by default for downloads and mail attachments. When I'm cropping and sharpening photos to upload, checking out a video or just testing out a script or program, into junkdrawer the files go. Files I decide I want to keep graduate from junkdrawer into docs; otherwise, the automated hard drive janitor I wrote about awhile back comes sweeping through and deletes anything older than 2 weeks from junkdrawer while I sleep.
- multimedia
Here's where your music, video and photos folders go. In terms of managing your media within this folder, I'm generally content to let iTunes and Picasa take care of things. Of course your preference may vary, but the benefit of having all those space-hogging sound, video and image files under one multimedia umbrella parent folder is backup. Chances are your multimedia backup scheme will be different than your documents backup because of the lesser change frequency and the gigabytage required. Drop 'em all here in the multimedia folder and you're good to go. Keep in mind that sharing your media with a home web server works nicely with an overarching multimedia folder, too.
- scripts
The scripts folder is where any executable script or shortcut lives. Here I keep my previously-mentioned weight logger and janitor scripts, any batch scripts and Windows shortcuts for quick launching programs.
A word about Windows' default home directory
As I said, I'm a big fan of short and to the point file paths. Windows' default user documents directory is something like:
C:\Documents and Settings\Gina\My Documents\ To which I say, "For the love of all that is good and holy, why, Microsoft, why?"
I can appreciate human-readable folder names, but I do lots of command line work and scripting, and I don't ever want to have to remember to enclose my home directory path in quotes or remember the slashes to escape spaces. So to make things easier, I always change the home "My Documents" directory to c:\home\gina\. This consistently lowercase path sans spaces is much easier to type, remember and much more scriptable.
To change your documents directory in Windows, right-click on the "My Documents" icon. Under Properties, hit the Move button.
Choose the new location. Windows will politely ask if you'd like to move all your documents from the old location to the new one. Go ahead and do that if you need to.
Note about changing your home directory your documents directory: If you change your "My Documents" path, some dumb Windows applications will STILL think that the C:\Documents and Settings\blah... path is your home directory, so sometimes application data will get saved there. I figure this info can't be too important if the app couldn't figure out where the new home directory is, but it This is something worth keeping in mind.
Update: Reader Helena points out that there is a difference between the home directory and the "My Documents" folder, which would explain why Windows apps would still save files to the original home directory. Looks like I'm the dumb one! Thanks, Helena!
Beyond the big 6
If you've read this far, then I'm going to let you in on a little secret: these aren't the only folders that live in my home directory. Being a programmer and web developer, if the workstation I'm on is a development machine, I also frequently work within a "code" folder and a "webserver" folder (the root of my Apache installation.) Also, many Windows applications take it upon themselves to create folders in "My Documents." Sometimes I leave 'em, other times I'll explicitly set where stuff gets saved - like my Trillian IM logs or Thunderbird mail archives location (docs and docs-archive, respectively.)
But enough about me. There must be strong feelings out there about filing versus piling and what the best folder structure is. So, lifehackers, show us your filing mojo. What does your "My Documents" look like? Why does it (or doesn't it) work for you? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.
Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, enjoys a well-organized folder more than she should admit. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Rick says: I use a Mac, so I tag each file with one or more categories and keep all the files in just one folder. When I need to find a file or a group of files that meet one or more categories , I create a Spotlight search or a SmartFolder. Fast and flexible.
jkdufair says: Gigabytage! I love it. Not only is LH on the cutting edge of technology and all things hacky, but it also is redefining language for the better as as bonus. Cool FA. I have evolved a similar system, mostly by accretion, but I like this one slightly better, as I currently struggle with backup strategy. It may be time to upgrade my folders.
Brad says: Gina: The reason some folders still save in C:\Documents and Settings\ is that your "My Documents" location is not your Home folder. If you really want to tell all applications that the default saving directory is in C:\home\, you would have to change all instances of the Docs&Settings directory in your registry to your new desired location. This would move everything, from Word settings to Firefox profiles, to the new location, and it's not recommended unless it's done along with an OS reinstall. And in regards to the whole thrust of the article... I use a Mac, so I don't have to be too careful where I save things as long as they exist in a folder that Quicksilver can access.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor says: Brad is absolutely right - I'm updating the post right this moment. I mistakenly used "home directory" and "My Documents" interchangeably, which they are most certainly not. My bad. It makes me crazy though, how difficult it is to change where your home directory is - which wouldn't be necessary if Windows made it something more reasonable like Mac's \Users\gina. Of course, Apple can't talk, because moving your iTunes library from one folder to another ain't a walk in the park either.
Storme says: I share your frustration with the "documents and settings" structure. It's retarded (although the tab key does mitigate things somewhat as long as you're in the command line console and you have the right case for the folder name). I was all prepared to create my own "my documents" folder until I came upon the same issue you mentioned (some programs expect the home folder to be in Documents and Settings anyway). That just bugged me so I decided to just live with the windows way of doing things. I also have a Finances folder inside your "docs" equivalent, and incidently that also includes screenshots (saved as jpg or bmp) of web receipts. My printer takes too long to warm up and print so basically whenever an ecommerce site says "you better print out this receipt for your records" I adjust the window appropriately (maximumize, re-size etc.), hit alt-printscreen, launch paint, paste and save as a jpg in the receipts folder. It may not be appropriate in all cases, but has worked for me so far.
Ido Yellin says: Daniel Petri suggests in his article that was recommended here, to move the location of My Documents to another physical disk, on a partition called D:\Documents, so that it's possible to format the C:\ drive without loosing any important information.
Pat says: You can also do the "Moving my documents folder" to put your My Documents folder onto a removable drive (like an external USB hard drive). I work on multiple computers, so on my primary computer my USB HD automatically mounts to the folder C:\Documents and Settings\myname\My Documents (you can set any external drive to mount to any empty folder on your local filesystem -- right-click on "My Computer" and choose manange... it's under "Disk Management"). Really, that folder is empty on my internal HD, since it's just a mount point, but when my external HD is plugged in it looks like all my data is on the internal drive. Then when I leave the office to work at home, I just grab my external HD (conveniently I have a mini-sized one) and I have all of my data ready to go with no sync required. I also do regular backups more dilligently than most, since I'm physically carrying around my primary HD. The neat part is that my automatic backup method makes a duplicate of my home directory, which includes all of my portable data when the external HD is plugged in (because to Windows it's just another subfolder).
Matt Fischer says: All my stuff - documents, music, install files, photos, etc - lives in c:\asdf\. Why? Because, for any touch-typist, typing "asdf" is literally as easy as drumming one's fingers on a table-top. Some stuff lives in logically-named sub-directories, like c:\asdf\music and c:\asdf\installs. But my most-used folder - where all work-work- and personal-work-type documents are stored - is "c:\asdf\asdf\". Getting there is super-easy, whether within a dialog box or from the Windows-key-R Run command line. This structure makes various flavors of data more portable - I can easily package and transfer just music, or just installs, etc. And having it all in a single master asdf directory makes massive backups and/or whole-cloth sync'ing a piece of cake, too. One other tip - not directly related, but the "c:\asdf\installs\" reference above made me think of it. For all I know, someone's posted on this, but… hard drive space is dirt-cheap, and being stuck without a critical install file can be horribly expensive. So every time I buy or download software, I store a copy of the install files in the c:\asdf\installs directory, each application in its own sub. Software keys, when needed, are stored in .txt files right in the same sub-directory as the app's installer etc. This OCDesque habit has saved my a** (and others' a**es) more times than I can count. It makes changing systems and/or hard drives much easier, too - no hunting for original install media, etc. Right now, the \installs\ directory is 5GB big, but even on a 55.8GB laptop drive, it's space very well spent.
BEG says: I started out on unix systems, so a good file structure was always a necessity. When I started working on windows, I also had a great deal of trouble with the utterly inane (and rather inflexible, as already pointed out) My Document setup. I take a slightly different tack. I always have a directory on the desktop (be it linux or windows) with the same name (anything other than /home, My Document, etc, because a lot of malware out there automatically look in these places. I don't do much windows scripting, so the issue of typing out the real path name here is irrelevant. In that directory (let's say it's called BEG), I have a saveit folder (much like the bak; on windows this includes a copy of the my documents folder for those items that do get dumped in there), and has downloads/dumps from my databases, my online things like firefox, delicious, livejournal, etc). I have a finances folder, a classes folder for various different classes that I take, a tmp directory (like the junkdrawer), a pictures directory, a projects directory (for work and personal projects), and a writing directory for various other things I write up for fun or more seriously. A mail directory for a backup copy of all my email (from many, many differnent sources over the last 20 years). I don't really do music or movies on my computer, but if I did, I'd make music/video directories. Maybe at that point it would make sense to group pictures/video/music under multimedia. When I back up, I need only copy BEG. (And what I do here is just tarball or zip BEG and dump it onto alternating external hard disk drives. Really, has anyone ever found backup software to be usable for small scale stuff on personal PC's?? If nothing else, restoring from these things has never been very workable for me since it almost always devolves into a reinstallation of the OS anyway.) Oh, and this one is very important, I keep a simple file in BEG/log that details everything I do to that computer -- installations, upgrades, new software, settings, anything at all. This completely saves my bacon when I have to reinstall things and try to remember what i had, where it went, what the assorted IP addresses were, etc. On my work computer I have one more "directory" which is a flash drive, for anything personal, so I do not wind up storing anything of mine on a work computer.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor says: Wow, all great comments, impressive systems, and fanastic tidbits! I'm taking notes.
c2d says: Storme, An alternative to screenshots of web receipts is printing to a PDF file. You can use a simple software like PDF995 (shareware; shows nag screen if you don't buy) that installs as a printer so you can print from any application including your web browser to a PDF file. Gina, Yes, I too *hate* the default "My Documents" location. I have set it up to be "C:\mydocs\". This article gave me many good insights -- Thanks everyone!
emrainey says: As for the rogue programs that don't use the system variable %USERPROFILE%, the best way that I can think of to fix this is to use System Internals' Tool call "Junction" which creates NTFS links in your file system. The tool is free from http://www.sysinternals.com. The linking of the document's folder can be accomplished rather easily from the command line, or from a startup script on boot like this (if the username folder exists): junction "C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents" C:\home\%USERNAME%\docs This creates a NTFS junction which makes your shorter named docs folder appear at "My Documents". None of the DOS commands will know the difference, but the Win32 and COM API will know (you can read about that at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library... You can remove the link by: junction -d "C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents" I have a big script that runs at startup from the registry in the Run Keys (or you can put it in your Startup start menu folder) which links a whole bunch of folders all over my system so that I can have a centralize backup much like Gina's system and still have short paths everywhere (specifically for obnoxious software that wants to be put on the root of the drive). I have my own scripts and binaries that I have designed in a junction at C:\bin which links back into my home directory. This helps to keep my environment variables short and readable. echo PATH=%PATH% PATH=C:\bin;C:\sdks\perl\bin;C:\sdks\lcc\bin;C:\sdks\ti\bin;C:\sdks\java\bin;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\system32 All of those paths are in the "Program Files" locations that those compilers like to live in and are linked into a shorter path at boot up. This is also great for switching versions of tools/programs/etc without reinstalling. You simply change the link to point from folder tool1.0 to folder tool2.0 and you're done.
wayne says: i save my "my documents" for just that -- my (word) documents. everything else goes in c:\inbox, with appropriate subfolders. some of them include: \download -> for all downloaded software, each filed into its own sub-subfolder with descriptive folder names ex: C:\inbox\download\Autostitch (freeware panorama maker)\ \firefox -> for all firefox extensions (again, subfolders structure similar to \download\) ex: C:\inbox\fireFox\fasterfox (browser optimizer)\ \wiki -> for my GTD Wiki \pictures -> my replacement for "My Pictures," which I don't use. Pictures filed by location, then date and desc. ex: C:\inbox\pictures\seattle\home\2005.10.17 pumpkin carving\
schizo_phrenic says: After a couple of really traumatic experiences with loosing all my documents fron c: when I was forced to format it I now keep all my stuff on D:\ Into: \Progs, \Docs, \Images, \Music, \Rubbish, but if i am doing some extensive downloading on the nest then i dump everytjing into \Unclassified and then reorganize.Is ther is file Tagging software eor windows like they can in Mac? I guess most of the serious users out there will ahve veloved some good folder structure for them selves but a file tagging software for windows would be a welcome relief.
Rick says: Gina, to move your iTunes library from one folder to another, go to iTunes preferences > Advanced > type new folder address, and then consolidate library. A walk in the park ;-)
goneflyin says: Another way to 'simplify' the path without worrying about programs still using the c:\Documents....\My Documents location is to KEEP using it -- but map a drive letter using the 'subst' command. So if you had your directory here: C:\>dir "Documents and Settings\username\My Documents" Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is FCD2-BAD0 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents 02/08/2006 06:32 AM
bpm says: "I spend a lot of time at the command line, so I always opt for shortened file names." While I agree that the command line offers you unparalleled speed, it shouldn't limit your file name length. That's where the TAB key kicks in. One of the most frustrating things I find when trying to share files with clients, friends, or even just when organizing my own work is undescriptive filenames. In my mind, at least, the file name should be able to instantly tell you a lot about the particular file. For example, when I write invoices, I format the file name as "Invoice - (date) - (job description) - (client)". That way, I instantly know that A) It's an invoice, B) when I sent it, C) what it's for and D) to whom I sent it. Even with a long file name with lots of spaces and such, you can still format it in a such a way where smashing the TAB key will automatically complete it for you, retaining all your command line super-powers, as well as instantly giving you all sorts of useful information about the file.
Adam says: BEG wrote: "Really, has anyone ever found backup software to be usable for small scale stuff on personal PC's??" try www.mozy.com. it's free. it's off site. it's encrypted. it's runs in the background. 2 GB limit. HTH, Adam
Balaji says: Many thanks to Adam for sending me an invite! For people who work in IT, the usual situation is to wind up working on the same issue for several days as you try one thing after another. One way to organize all the files you generate when working on an issue is to create a testing folder and then create a folder for each day, for example, testing\22-feb-2006 and then testing\23-feb-2006. You can save files with a nice descriptive name the client likes, then if the client "oh, the file you sent on
Runar says: There is support in TweakUI from MS Powertoys for changing Documents and Settings folder or my documents folder to something else. It's really simple to. Just select it and select a new target in TewakUI. Foldershare comes in handy with this set-up. Just setup folder share for your current project and sync it towards your always-on server at home. Don't have a server? Use gmail driver hacks or buy an account on runbox.com and use syncback to stay up-to-date. Ad-hoc: my best timesaver: Tired of running apps? create a shortcut in the startmenu that starts with a unique number (0-9) and presto. Just hit win and then the number. Instant launch!!
markellis says: Well having OCD like I do, I have been doing this for some time. My filing system in My Documents is Audio, ProgMan, Visual, and Written. Under each of those are a variety of folders. For Audio, artists folders if they have more than five songs I have or a huge individual folder otherwise. In ProgMan, it is broken down by type. Visual is broken up into many segments, actual photos as well as interesting things I have saved. Under Written, it is stored by type, all my graduate and undergrad papers, job folder (hopefully very temporary), and my personal fav Assorted What Not.
BEG says: One thing to remember about something like www.mozy.com is that legally speaking those records are less secure than if they were on a system you personally owned. mozy.com could be served with a subpoena to turn the documents over, whereas something saved on say an external drive you own would require a warrant. (A subpoena can be requested of a third party by a justice at any time it's considered relevant to the issue at hand and it's incredibly general, you can just say "any documents pertaining to this..."; a warrant must show probable cause, and describe very specifically what it is that can be seized, and there's a time limit, and so on -- so if they describe the wrong hard disk for example, they'd need to go out and get another warrant to get the right one. Basically you're more protected with warrants than with subpoenas.) This is an area of law that I believe needs to be changed (if it's your information, it should take a warrant regardless of it's actual location), but until then, it's best to be aware of the potential issues with your information and how protected it is. Pedantry aside, thanks for the link! This could be very useful for miscellaneous stuff between computers and OS independent to boot.
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