curating your home directory

[mir]

as a gen z, I say that much of my life has existed digitally. ultra convenience permitted thinking less about what I save. only recently have I re-realized the seriousness of files, the data they hold as a proof of    reality/the past/something

there's a return to curation that is to be had, I think. enough of the endless stream of things that I may or may not care about. and I want to own things, give things names, have them live in my house. offline, off the net. get it

(rather save a picture than to rely on the platform's "saved likes" on your profile's section. the feelings to be had upon seeing this picture are mine, they belong to me. I'm not letting the cloud hold onto it for me. I'm downloading this drawing and putting it on my computer. I'm bookmarking this page, rather than simply following the account.)

unlike material things, it's easy to hoard files. today I'm trying to build a system to organize the files on my drive. there's a lot of talk about organizing site files, optimizing images.. but I wonder if anyone applies this kind of discipline to their local home drives as well.

I know "data hoarding" is a thing, but "hoard" implies "just take anything and everything, as much data as possible". towers of hard drives are common... but I'm not about that, and I'm operating on 500gigabites on my home folder, which is getting full. it's becoming very necessary that I upgrade my system ("sunflower" ultramarine 42 --> ultramarine 44, linux) before the coming week, but part of that process, I've stated to myself, is that I re-organize my files once more—some housekeeping that's been long overdue, and maybe, turn this into a little weekly cleaning habit.

from "sunflower", or what I've named my laptop, rises "dayflower", a flashdrive project.. of some sorts. dayflower's page is terribly outdated as of writing this. in its essence it is a file curation project. simply, files that I think are important or enjoyable, worth being made accessible at any time via USB. I have movies, youtube videos, published articles, whole books, pictures that are dear... even a puppy linux install for the apocalypse, I think. I think, in a way, it's like a journal. a record of Me, via files.  or something.

what feelings do you hold over your silly, ephemeral bytes?

[GideonWilhelm]

Man, I have got to start organizing and curating my folders.  I've recently just set game dev aside for a variety of reasons, so a lot of that stuff is cleared out, but I do still have a couple hobby game engines half-built that I might revisit.  But I think when I get off work today, I'm gonna get stoned and do a *bunch* of organizing.  I have a KDE Oxygen setup that looks so slick and clean, it calls for organized files!

I've also been clearing out some movies and shows I'd been hoarding, since all I ever watch anymore is stargate, star trek, and South park.

I don't think I've ever had "feelings" regarding my files, but since I've been trying to cut out YouTube, I've been thinking a lot more carefully about what I store and what I don't need to be hoarding.

[chilblands]

imply, files that I think are important or enjoyable, worth being made accessible at any time via USB

I never thought to use my USB this way. I hoard physical collections, and apparently if a file is unopened for a long time it will go away/ get corrupt. In fact when I graduated high school, my school gave me a USB with my grade's pictures. 3 years later, everything is corrupted. All those pictures are lost these things can be avoided with certain programs or if you open them often enough.

I do have a 8GB yellow Toshiba USB I named "banana" which holds all of my tertiary assessments (college, Bachelor and Master), scholarly articles, textbooks, resume/cover letter, printable files (planners, origami templates, colouring pages, etc..), Andrew Loomis PDF books and Japanese learning materials.

I love your Dayflower USB, it reminds me I can do more with my existing USB! I already have a big photo file, audiobook files and FLAC music files in my local laptop that can be copied in an external memory storage... maybe even games I bought and my favourite show/movies. You never know anymore when something will be removed from streaming

Right now the memory shortage is really hitting. I was eyeing a 1TB Samsung microSD card for ~200AUD at the beginning of this year and the price have doubled darn you tech giants!!!

[clownvomitz]

i really enjoyed looking through this project of yours, really inspirational and cool! i know for a fact i have my own data i really would love to preserve, i should get on that at some point... 

[serenefork]

"dayflower" is a very sweet project to me. It really does come across as a personal journal of the files you love. I have been personally struggling with organizing/curating my files since I don't always have a clear grasp on what I will want or need later, but I think making use of USB/external drives would probably help me better organize my own files.

I remember as a kid sharing a single USB with my older sibling's art program installed onto it so that we could use it on the family computer and their laptop. USBs really can show what people find to be an important file that they want to carry around or share. I think "dayflower" really captures that feeling well.