How do you organize your data?

I'm not quite sure if this is in the right section, so what the hell, right?

I've reached the point where I have multiple machines and quite the collection of files spread across. Looking at my main workstation, my 'home' partition that has all my digital junk. I've been a data hoarder. I have digital receipts saved as HTML files, photoshopped images, course notes, ebooks, legal documents, family photographs, the obligatory media collection of music-moving pictures, log files for chat services, electrical schematics in a plethora of formats (images, eagle... etc), notes I've jotted down, essays...

I guess I'm just sort of fishing for ideas for strategies that can be applied to organizing files.
I suppose file type and applications used play a role on how you organize. My problem is I'm in twenty different places.

I'm open to suggestion and to start off, here I briefly describe my data and applications:

Music --- foobar2000 (entire library is meticulously tagged and loaded in. Also sorted by file structure starting with Band - Year - Album Name)

Video --- VLC/Windows Explorer/None (only organized by dir structure, suggestions?)

eBooks & Technical Reading --- PDF with Adobe Acrobat

Notes/Documents/Spreadsheets --- OpenOffice Suite

Other junk like receipts are html and scanned documents are images which is a pain. I haven't found OCR software that does a good job. I do most of my looking manually with Explorer. It is terribly inefficient.

Suggestions/how do you do it? Pictures and opinions welcomed.

In general (my organization) ~ folder for music, folder for videos, folder for installers/apps, few other folders but everything organized. Each of those folders generally contains anywhere from 2 to 20 subfolders.
I used to have everything shared on that drive because in the XP days you could just share an entire drive + all subdirectories, but Vista/7 don't like doing that very much without a lot of jumping through hoops. Now I just have WMP set up to allow sharing/streaming just so I can pick up my mp3s on the 360 and Ps3, otherwise I just use the Public Documents shared folder as a temp for going across the network at home.

If you're looking to organize across systems you might want to look into something cloud based like Dropbox, although that probably won't cut it for the music (assuming you have even a small mp3 library).

re: OCR software, well, IME OCR is a lot of promise and not all that practical. I've tried using it before, even lately (Acrobat Pro has OCR recognition). Unless your source document is top notch, OCR is not going to work well.

If you're looking for some "all in one" library type apps, ok, you're covered with music and foobar (though I've never been a foobar fan myself, though I do love Media Monkey). VLC is great for video, another one of my favorites. For pictures, you may want to look into XnView which is freeware, excellent program....opens and converts a ton of formats. The other stuff, sure, OpenOffice or LibreOffice will work with.

You don't say what OS you are using, but in Windows7, you can set up Libraries.

Well, I have a central data server at home with a large 10TB array partition. Everything goes there and is organized into its proper folder.

Media
-Music
--Artist
---Album
-Movies
-TV
--Show
---Season
-Pictures
--Album Name
Backup
-Documents
Etc...

When at home it's a simple SMB connection away to access the files and I usually have the root drive mounted to Z:/. When remote there are many options. I can VPN into my network and use SMB, or use SFTP, or log into my server's web interface and access files directly through there. For my phone there is an app in the app store that lets me access my files through my servers interface, etc.

Lot's of directories, shared in Windows 7 homegroup

I have about 4TB of various files, on several drives.. Here is the basics on how I organize:

Music
- Artist
--Album

Movies
-(each movie is in it's own folder. I eventually want to make sub-folders for kid/family movies as my library grows)

TV
-Brit TV
--Show
---Season
-US TV
--Show
---Season
-Anime
--Show

Pictures
several folders for just misc stuff, eg. "Wallpaper", "Icons", "Funny", etc.
then I have "Photos" that are pictures I have taken, organized by album name.

That's about it. Over the years, as a library get bigger, I find the need to organize by genera, or anything else that I can classify as a group to aid in helping me find things.

YMMV,. My friends and clients each have their own individual preferences on how to organize things.

haphazardly is probably the best description.

I have one directory that is mapped to a raid array and backed up hourly for stuff I can't just download again, and stuff in there is haphazardly organized as well.

It's just not worth it to spend all day keeping shit organized when I can get to anything, no matter where it is, in about 2 seconds with a grep query.

The only real organization I do (dwindling down) is letting Media Monkey dump my library into folders with the following structure: Album Artist/Album Title/## Track name.mp3
I let ID3 tags take care of the rest in MM itself in terms of being organized.

Otherwise I generally try to lump things into a folder and sometimes have folders within folders. I don't really spend much time on organizing though outside of a folder here or there.

always use folders and folders since the NT time....

I sort everything as shown below and use FileSearchEX to find anything I can't remember. Of course, there are times when I don't remember the contents of a document and so I have to search for that as well. The main thing to do when organizing your stuff is to think of every file as a home ... every home in the world has an address: Earth / North America / USA / California / blah / blah ... so just organize your files that way and it's easy to find them.

Media / Audio
Media / Video
Software / Editors
Software / Networking
Software / System Utilities
Photography / 2011 / etc
Projects / etc
Temp

However you organize data, its important to find stuff. And like most people I have multiple hard drives spread over multiple pc's, laptop, externals etc.

What I use is a very small, fast, portable catalog program called Cathy - http://www.mtg.sk/rva/. I put this in my Dropbox folder (and it's catalogs too), and added all my drives. Now from any pc, I can quickly and easily see where a file is, whether I already have it, search for duplicates, see how much storage I have etc. It's fantastic.

Important video, audio, pictures, emails & notes are instantly
available through random or direct access.

The info you actively use resides on a thumb drive. Portable and Yours.

My notes files are of primary interest to me. I have stored years of "Google
search" strings. Now and then I'll randomly sample those. Most interesting.
My notes include todo item notes. daily diary type entries. peoples names etc.
I keep passwords to the many web sites where I have registered. I save the URL
links along with any text comment on the threads of interest..
I have an email friends list that I pass jokes along to...
Most everything gets tagged with a ??Nov2015 so I can recall recent entries...

When your data is text, jpg, mpg and Mp3 like this. It can be ported to all computer types!
Instantly or to the Cloud

ls -l

/
Documents
- College
-- Semester
Work

Don't even store music or movies anymore. Nope! Nope nope nope!

You need a server if you've got so many machines and scattered data.Take one spare machine and stuff a bunch of drives in it, and turn on software raid.

Media drive:
MEDIA
MOVIES
HD
720
1080
SD
TV
MUSIC
PHOTOS

Personal Drive:
Docs
Photos
Misc

I have crap spread out over all of my drives.
My main media; movies and tv shows, are easy to find as they have folders on specific drives but the rest of the drives have random data that I have collected over the years with no real organization.
I've kept putting off organizing the data, I'll tell myself that I'd do it tomorrow but then tomorrow comes and I'll put if off again.



I'd like to have raid and one large drive to make it easier to keep stuff organized but I was adding drives and upgrading drives as they filled up and could never afford to buy a bunch of drives at once to make a nice raid setup.

All you need is folders and a good search like Everything.

I have over 30tb of data an organize by type: apps, music, video, etc and then gets more granular from there. This structure that I have created is more than 15 years old and followed from one server to the next. Most personal/data type files are stored locally, like word docs, pdf,s etc and then backed up. I have never used search to locate files on file server, only local machine mostly due to the shear volume of files.

its difficult for large data. Well, I select one day, then manually organize my data by making certain folders. Then transfer all related data to that folders. my way. otherwise copy data to external hard drive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEVSyWv9p9k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je4N9CrFYJ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u-2iUmSO_k

I just throw all the receipts in a shoe box and let my accountant figure out what the hell I did.