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 dayflower's page is terribly outdated as of writing this.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?

edit: fixed link to dayflower; I moved hosts

[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.

[Horsey Chobunso]

I love this project! I take some effort into organizing my music and game folders, but I've never thought to organize it in a way that would make sense on a portable drive. I think I'm gonna try this next week. I was looking for a reason to try Puppy Linux anyway lmao.

[mir]

Multidimensional file organizing issue /home update

an update on dayflower since the page remains untouched until now: a week or so ago, I reinstalled my laptop's OS. goodbye sunflower, hellow meadow (debian 13). it shall however retain the nickname "sunflower", but less on sunflower and more on dayflower.

so I had to clear out dayflower's files to make room to back up my home files on dayflower. dayflower had to give up its pristine title as a curation project and hold a highly delicate job for me—holding the only copy of my super important home files. sad to say being in a rush led to me forgetting to include some files in the backup, but I don't really want to feel the heart ache.

now I'm still sitting here in my empty, fresh clean home directory with nothing in it. I haven't bothered copying all my files from dayflower onto meadow yet but I really should; it's my only copy of some Really important files. but given this blank slate of a user directory, I suppose I should set some rules while it's new.

In the /home of flowers:

Ephemeral directories - quick stops for all kinds of files

~/Desktop I've come to take this dir literally. It is my desktop where files come and go. Anything temporary goes here, to be moved to a more permanent path or deleted. usually it's short-term backups, copies of config files, files I'm working on like notes or file packs, and screenshots.

~/Downloads Another 'temp' folder but this time solely for files that come from the internet. lots of .zip files and torrented files to be found here.

Archive directories - permanent homes for files

~/Documents These are .pdf and .epub files of books, papers and other articles of textual work that I have downloaded from the internet or received from places. it also includes real life documents that are important to me in real life as in IDs and certificates and stuff.

~/Pictures and ~/Videos Multimedia like pictures and videos. These include pictures I have taken, my digital drawing files, images that I just really like, memes and memes I've created, my photo and video editing project files, and movies and youtube videos I downloaded to keep forever.

~/Music This one is simple and no further branches complicate its rules. I pirate high quality FLACs on my laptop and dump it all in the Music folder, which then gets copied over to mimmy, my dumbphone smartphone, another one of my curation projects. mimmy essentially is my music player that I take whereever I go.

~/Code This dir is my own addition that holds my coding related files, since code files aren't exactly "documents". It's both an ephemeral and archive home directory as it contains the files to my live websites and therefore its multimedia assets, and its past versions' archives alongside various other coding experiments.

the organizing problem dir experiments

as a fan in fandoms, I like to save digital paraphernalia of the media that I like and I feel this has been an issue I've been having since fandom-related files come in various formats be it Pictures, Documents or Videos, hence organizing them heavily tripped me up causing me to end up with a messy unmaintained home. I am however hoping to experiment with the use of symbolic links (shortcuts in Windows terms) to organize my fandom files; ideally there is a Fandom dir containing dirs for each fandom I'm archiving ~/Fandom/[awesome fandom 1]/, and within those fandom folders are links to... say,, ~/Documents/Fandom/[awesome fandom 1]/Fanfiction/ or like ~/Pictures/Fandom/[awesome fandom 1]/Fanart/ I suppose. Not a fan of the double Fandom folders even if they have different parent folders. This is my biggest issue <-- hurts my head.

I also want a convenience that is to have all the files I've personally created be it written compositions or edited videos to be accessible through a designated ~/Creations folder, which I suppose could come in the form of a folder of just links to folders within every home folder. folder. so every home folder is going to have a My Projects/ folder in each of them... ugh..!

add to the fact that you can't copy symlinks over on linux filesystems! the linking structures all get in the way of making backups. it's terribad.

that's all. folder