How is your home data organized?

Joined
Oct 19, 2002
Messages
618
I'm about to start digging through my hard drives and cleaning up file names, folder names, and trying to add some structure.

Currently, I have my SSD with Win 8 and most programs installed to it. My 3TB drive is for all my games and video editing scratch space. My 4TB drive is for mass sotrages such as media and photos.

The structure for the media drive is Z:\+Tv Shows, Z:\+Movies, etc. The 3TB stucture is the natural installer path, such as Program Files\Steam\etc.

Photos are just pretty much randomly scattered in the My Pictures folder etc. Music is incredibly unorganized as well.

So....how do you maintain your data?
 
Three main folders: photos, music, movies (movies are currently on their own RAID).

Photos have sub-folders based on decade.

Music is alphabetical and broken down into folders of 20,000 or less.

Movies has two sub-folders: Movies and TV
 
I'm with Jorona, it's one of those "I know better, but just haven't gotten around to it" type of things.
 
So my file server is FS01\Shares\

From there I have:
Media
Software
Documents
Backups

Media:
Movies->Movie
TV Shows->Show->Season
Music->Artist->Album
Photos->Dates
Videos->Dates

Software:
Vendor->Software
Microsoft->Windows->Server 2012
Games->Games
etc.

Documents:
User->Stuff

Backups:
Machine->Backups

etc...
 
Two folders:
Porn
Not-Porn

:)

In all seriousness, like Jorona and dalfo, my data is pretty much organized poorly as I've had to move data around multiple drives when one drive gets too full.
 
When I put together my new ZFS fileserver I finally started to do things right I guess.

videos
sync
os
music
it_edu
games
edu
ebooks
comics
apps
photos
backups

I have a jbod zpool for stuff I don't care about and a mirrored vdev zpool for stuff i care about. The latter also gets backed up to Crashplan.
 
1 drive for music, 1 drive for movies, 1 drive for TV series, 1 drive for photos...

Then it became 2 drives. Then 3 drives. Then 4, then 5, then I went to a big-ass ZFS NAS because it was a pain to manage and backup those dozens of drives !
 
Mine's half enforced by Plex and it's naming scheme.

Still have it split up in to folders like:
SD Movies
HD Movies
TV Series
Anime
Cartoons

(and yes, Cartoons != Anime)
The rest is a half mess with folders like "Programs", "Games", "Stuff" (real descriptive there" and "Backup"
 
C: (OS)
D: (Downloads/Data/Installed Programs)
G: (Games)
P: (Guess :p)
 
D:\ 3TB WD - Alternative/Pop Music - D:\<GENRE>\<ARTIST> - <ALBUM>
E:\ 3TB WD - Electronic Music - E:\<GENRE>\<ARTIST> - <ALBUM>
F:\ 2TB WD - TV - F:\<Series>\<Season>
G:\ 2TB WD - Movies - G:\<Genre>\
M:\ 3TB WD - Metal/Rock Music M:\<GENRE>\<ARTIST> - <ALBUM>
P:\ 1.5TB WD - Pix - P:\<Year>\<Year>.<Month>\<Year>.<Month> - <Location>
 
4 drive raid 10 on my server with a shares folder. All shares are backed up to a external and all the really important stuff (pictures) also get backed up to onedrive.
 
So my file server is FS01\Shares\

From there I have:
Media
Software
Documents
Backups

Media:
Movies->Movie
TV Shows->Show->Season
Music->Artist->Album
Photos->Dates
Videos->Dates

Software:
Vendor->Software
Microsoft->Windows->Server 2012
Games->Games
etc.

Documents:
User->Stuff

Backups:
Machine->Backups

etc...

Mine is very similar to this. Most all of my major data is stored on my NAS but I still have a share that is really unorganized of really old files from all over. Then I have a few old external drives floating around that have data on it that need organized.
 
Haphazardly like most people. I know more or less where things are, but I frequently change my mind about directory structure, etc.

The scary folders are various temp/dump folders that I don't want to explicitly delete, but have stuff I need to go through and properly rename/tag/etc.

/music and /backups are reasonably organized for me.
 
If you start to amass a large collection, as important as how the directory structure may be to you the file naming conventions are even more important. If you plan on using one of the major media play/stream servers/apps like XBMC, Plex or Mediabrowser have a look at these links which will give you a good idea of best naming practices for your media to be most properly found the first time.
 
On my file server I have
/volumes

Then raid1, raid2, raid3

These are basically just "LUNs". raid2 is where most of my data is as that is my oldest array which was originally on my main server. Among the most important folders I have the following:

raid1:
mysql: mysql database data (NFS share to other servers)
p2p: torrents
vms_lun1: VM NFS share (each raid folder has a vms_lunx folder, I just spread VMs across, no specific system)

raid2:
appdev: app/web development. has a dev,test and prod folder which then contains 1 folder per project. Pretty much anything I work on from small to big. There are various sync scripts to sync projects from dev to test or test to live and other tools that help with development. This is a NFS share on a server called appdev.

backups: pretty self explanatory

applications: Sorta obsolete, replaced by appdev, but there's still some live stuff on here

intranet: Web based tools, was also used for local versions of my websites, but that got moved to appdev

public: "publicly" accessible stuff like install files, ISOs and stuff of that nature. Can access via a web address without needing any kind of credentials

userdata: All my stuff like pictures, documents etc...


raid3:
recently created, not much on here yet


This server is 100% for files only. It is a Supermicro 24 bay and has about 19TB total. Most of these folders are NFS shares accessible via their respective servers but mostly my workstation. Some stuff is accessible via web as well. I am still working on reorganizing some stuff but mostly happy with my setup. I don't store any dynamic data outside of this server, or at least I try not to. I have a few other servers where the mysql db is local but it gets backed up to the file server.

At some point I may look into making this more like a real SAN using iSCSI and a dedicated iSCSI network but by having it as a local normal file system it does make backups easier and more efficient.
 
I'll pull a couple folders out of memory for an example.

Applications
-Solaris 11.1
--Solaris 11.1 install .ISO
-7Zip Portable
--7Zip .EXE

Documents
-Schoolwork
--2006
---CIS310
----Project1
-----randomCode.c
--2007...etc
-Receipts
-WRX Damage

Downloads
-Anything and everything I download, cleaned out regularly

Music
-Artist
--Album
---Song

Video
-Movies
-Anime
--A
---Anime title that begins with A
----Episode
--B
---Anime title that begins with B
----Episode
-TV Shows
--Show Title
---Season
----Episode
 
I'll pull a couple folders out of memory for an example.

Applications
-Solaris 11.1
--Solaris 11.1 install .ISO
-7Zip Portable
--7Zip .EXE

Documents
-Schoolwork
--2006
---CIS310
----Project1
-----randomCode.c
--2007...etc
-Receipts
-WRX Damage

Downloads
-Anything and everything I download, cleaned out regularly

Music
-Artist
--Album
---Song

Video
-Movies
-Anime
--A
---Anime title that begins with A
----Episode
--B
---Anime title that begins with B
----Episode
-TV Shows
--Show Title
---Season
----Episode
Very similar to this.

ex. (last entry is file name structure):
Code:
Music\Band Name\(YYYY) Album Name\## - Song Name
Movies\Decade\(YYYY) - Movie Name - Director
TV Series\Network\(YYYY) Series Name\S##E## - Episode Name - Original Air Date [DDMMYYYY]
Programs\Category\General Name\*Dump*
Games\Platform\ID# - Game Name Version - CRC
Downloads\Category\*Dump*
Staging\Category\*Dump*

Same thing, Downloads is cleaned out regularly. Staging is to put things that will need to be renamed and organized using the structure I defined.
 
I download everything to my main PC on a 2TB drive, then move it off once it's done.
Main drive is a 250gig SSD

Then I move everything over to a RAID5 drive(8 2TB) that's attached to my linux server. Using mdadm.
It's setup like this:
Movies
Music - By artist then album
Apps
Apps\programs
Apps\games
Apps\books
TV

I just goofed trying to upgrade the firmware on my SAS controller, so I lost everything. :( before I did I was using about 11TB out of 14TB. Time to re-rip the BlueRays
 
Code:
Movies\Title (year)
TV\Show Name\Show Name - SXXEXX - Episode Name
Music\Artist\Year - AlbumName\Song Number - Song Name
Install Stuff\
          !Software Licenses
          Android
          Apple OS Images
          Apple Applications
          Applications
          AV & Spyware
          Canon
          CE
          Cisco
          Drivers
          Games
          Linux
          Microsoft Office
          Microsoft Operating Systems & Updates
          Misc
          Multimedia
          Network
          pfSense Images
          Utilities
          VMWare
Photos\Year-Month Subject
Documents
Downloads
Desktop
Backups
Books

that's most if it
 
Like most others my SSD has my OS and most things I use daily.
My 2TB HDD has pics, vids, music, movies, etc. Pics are in annual folders. Vids are daily or event folders.
 
My data is organized as good as you can possibly do it.

Folder structures and common naming convention for all similar files. Everything is easy as hell to navigate through and identify whats what. I was going to get more in depth with it but I figured it wont matter since XBMC or whatever front end I will use has their own library.
 
My data is organized as good as you can possibly do it.

Folder structures and common naming convention for all similar files. Everything is easy as hell to navigate through and identify whats what.

This.

There are people for years who have been screaming that actual folder structure is irrelevant because metadata in the files will help you search for what you want. I think those people are crazy.

Having a good organizational folder structure will always work long past when the other fads fade away.
 
This.

There are people for years who have been screaming that actual folder structure is irrelevant because metadata in the files will help you search for what you want. I think those people are crazy.

Having a good organizational folder structure will always work long past when the other fads fade away.

Quoting myself FTW. :D

I just got into Plex for watching my movie files. This organizational method served me well. Did not need to change a thing to have Plex tag my movies and TV shows correctly.
 
I have things broken down on my server as:
action_movies, comedy_movies, drama_movies, scifi_movies, kids_movies, tv_shows, kids_tv, horror_movies, and probably a few more sub categories.
I also have home_movies and pictures.
It's sometimes interesting to determine where a movie might go - say Alien. Is it horror or science fiction? Matrix - is it Action or Scifi?
My system works for me and helps break it down a lot. I can also easily lock down what my kids can see.
 
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