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Years ago I standardized on a pretty flat folder hierarchy for such PDFs as well as a file naming convention such as the following examples: topic-author-YYYY-M

Years ago I standardized on a pretty flat folder hierarchy for such PDFs as well as a file naming convention such as the following examples: topic-author-YYYY-MM-DD.pdf or article-title-website-domain-YYY-MM-DD.pdf, etc. In about 2 or 3 times in my life, i have also drafted a small summary of the content of a PDF into a sibling README (text file) for ease of findability later on. This was because those few PDFs were a very old docs that were scanned in, etc. Also, the sibling README file would be named the exact same as the PDF, though have a file extension of .txt or .md or ...-README.txt, etc. Nowadays, there are more tools available - as others have cited - which help with finding metadata. But i like to keep things simple, and because there's still way too many PDFs whose metadata starts with "Microsoft Word...", that i still stick to my file naming convention to help give hints about the contents.

mohdmasd 4y ago
This is exactly what I too do, flat folders is the best way. Plus two things on Windows: 1- Use everything search from voidtools.com 2- For documents that are in external storage I create zero-length files copies so I can search for them without plugging in external disks. robocopy X:\path_to_documents D:\path_to_zero_copy /e /create /xd $* Sys*
Terretta 4y ago
One suggestion: - Put the ISO8601 date in front. Use a tool to rename all existing ones. You will then be able to find things chronologically, they’ll be grouped as you found them, and you can find things you can’t remember except that you worked on them at the time you were doing that other thing. All your other ways of finding them still work. Bonus: also works as a better versioning convention than “Title v4 Bob Copy 2.docx”.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I appreciate your suggestion! However... About 2 decades ago or so, i in fact tried using the date in front...and found that i actually remember more vividly a particular topic (or author or even domain name), rather than dates. Often my mind squishes days together too much to be useful for me. Like people who remember faces great, but not names...i seem to recall topics vastly better than "when" such material was obtained. Hence, using date prefixes made it a tad more cumbersome to find things, at least at a glance. I use the date at the end merely for reference, but not so much for searchability. If i really wanted to find something by date - rare, though it happens - then i can either search via regex in GUI or command line search, such as *YYYY-MM-*.pdf ...etc. Thanks anayway! EDIT: Asterisks were previously omitted accidentally in my regex search.

mohdmasd 4y ago

This is exactly what I too do, flat folders is the best way. Plus two things on Windows: 1- Use everything search from voidtools.com 2- For documents that are in external storage I create zero-length files copies so I can search for them without plugging in external disks. robocopy X:\path_to_documents D:\path_to_zero_copy /e /create /xd $* Sys*

Terretta 4y ago

One suggestion: - Put the ISO8601 date in front. Use a tool to rename all existing ones. You will then be able to find things chronologically, they’ll be grouped as you found them, and you can find things you can’t remember except that you worked on them at the time you were doing that other thing. All your other ways of finding them still work. Bonus: also works as a better versioning convention than “Title v4 Bob Copy 2.docx”.

mxuribe 4y ago
I appreciate your suggestion! However... About 2 decades ago or so, i in fact tried using the date in front...and found that i actually remember more vividly a particular topic (or author or even domain name), rather than dates. Often my mind squishes days together too much to be useful for me. Like people who remember faces great, but not names...i seem to recall topics vastly better than "when" such material was obtained. Hence, using date prefixes made it a tad more cumbersome to find things, at least at a glance. I use the date at the end merely for reference, but not so much for searchability. If i really wanted to find something by date - rare, though it happens - then i can either search via regex in GUI or command line search, such as *YYYY-MM-*.pdf ...etc. Thanks anayway! EDIT: Asterisks were previously omitted accidentally in my regex search.