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At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc. I f

by corford 14y ago

At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc. I find it completely natural and a very easy way to file stuff. When I go to the bank, I take my banking folder with me. When I go to the insurance company, I take my insurance folder with me. My Mum and Dad (and likely most other people in the world) also have a similar system in their house. I store my digital files in a similarly compartamentalized, hierarchical manner. It may come as a surprise to you but my Mum and Dad (who are approaching 60 and are not exactly clued up computer users) also do the same thing on their PCs (dad with his various excel sheets and word docs, mum with her photos). Of all the brain dead questions they ask me to do with their computers and the various tech problems they have, understanding folders and using them is literally something that has never come up. The paradigm is immediately obvious to them and they find it a natural way to catalogue and store their files. This notion that a user is too lazy to organise their files is simply something I have NEVER seen (and I've seen quite a lot when it comes to bad computer users). If my parents were to be given a computer that had no concept of directories it would be a disaster. They would be just as lost as when I try to explain to them that the email they see in Thunderbird is the same as the one they see via webmail because Thunderbird is accessing their mail account through IMAP. To them that just sounds like magic. They much preferred it when they used to get their email via POP. Oh, and guess how they organise their email? Yep, lots of folders. I don't think they've ever used the tagging and advanced search features offered by Thunderbird. I'm the same and it would fill me with rage having to exclusively interact with all my files through a GUI front end to an sqlite database. Which effectively is what we're talking about here. I can't think of anything more non-intuitive or pointless.

kokey 14y ago
I think it's highly dependent on the type of person, or family. For example I have had to help many people track down their documents which are somewhere in a download or documents folder. I, personally, am not the kind of person who sorts my paperwork into folders. Neither, like some people, do I organise every single e-mail into a folder. Gmail has understood this well, and makes it easier to find what I want. I find it much easier to make sure I know _when_ something happened, I make sure I e-mail myself notes, and copies of documents, but most of the time it happens by itself anyway, so I can search for them in Gmail. For example if I want to find some paperwork done when we moved into a new house, I can track down the date in Gmail, and know in which box to go dig it up. Most of the time what I need has an e-mail record somewhere. That said, I strongly support allowing people to approach the problem from both sides, chronological with good tagging/searching or being able to organise things into folders in a way they like. People work in different ways. However, I think the default is to be disorganised, and the best way to deal with being disorganised is to keep it as simple as possible.
prof_hobart 14y ago
But physical paper has basic restrictions that digital media doesn't - like lack of easily searchable metadata, and being able to be in multiple groups at one time. My photos (many thousands of them) are stored in folders by date, but I pretty much never search them that way. I use Lightroom, which automaticaly puts basic stuff like date in there, and allows me to tag every photo with things location, themes, people, ratings etc. It also allows me to put them into (multiple, if I want) groups. And it's combinations of these things that I use to locate my photos - e.g. all the photos of my daughter in Berlin in 2008. My music is little different - I might fancy listening to a specific album, or a random bunch of jazz tracks or whatever. I get to them through my music app, not through the filesystem. Some other stuff still relies more on basic directory structures, but that's only because I've not found a suitable set of tools that provide me with a full metadata approach just yet. And yes, a lot of people would probably initially struggle with moving away from directories and over to a metadata-based world, but that's more to do with the fact that it's what they are currently used to than it being a fundamentally better approach.
- super_mario 14y ago
  And just because two files are in different folders you can't still tag them and make them part of the bigger concept? In fact with folders and tagging you are getting the best of both worlds.
  - prof_hobart 14y ago
    I didn't say that you couldn't tag them if they are in folders. My point is that a fixed directory structure is pretty much irrelevant to how I usually want to manage/search my photos etc - it adds pretty much nothing to what I can manage far more flexibly through the metadata.
    - super_mario 14y ago
      Except when searching by metadata doesn't find what you want. Or when it finds too much. This is now 99% case for me when I use spotlight. I have a huge library of PDF books (tens of gigabytes). If I search for a bunch of keywords or even if I know entire title, the damn spotlight returns way too many irrelevant results. Now I could perhaps spend 10 - 20 seconds thinking about how to write a more specific query, but it's faster to actually go to ~/Reference/Computer Science/CS Theory/ and get right to my damn book, which I know will be there based on how I structured my filesystem and the topic the book covers. This has in fact gotten worse since snow leopard, before the default was to show file name matches first then content matches. So if you want a book on algorithms, almost all CS theory books will match. You have to type filename:"book title" to be more specific. Now one could argue that Spotlight should get better. But I'm arguing that you will always encounter cases where it will be really difficult to find what you want, even if you know a lot about what you are searching, let alone if you vaguely remember a detail about what you want to find. But by being able to restrict what you are looking for you will have better luck. Searching for photos is much easier, because photos are binary content, so apart from EXIF there is not much to look for in there. But if you have documents with plain text or searchable content like PDFs, things get a lot worse.
ZoFreX 14y ago
From what I've seen on the computers I've used, non-technical people seem to have far better filing systems in general. My mum and dad both organise their files and emails impeccably, whereas my file structure is so badly organised I can literally lose files for years before rediscovering them like an archeologist on a dig.
- bradwestness 14y ago
  They also likely have a much lower volume of files to manage, being non-technical and all. I could probably get by with the single folder level at home, where I mostly just browse the internet and watch video on my PC, but having to manage all my various projects at work would be a nightmare. How are you supposed to check out a source code repository? Many frameworks require things to be in a specific folder structure in order to work.
vorg 14y ago
> At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc. Inside one of the manila folders, do you keep an apartment building, with 12 floors, each floor with 20 apartments, each apartment with 3 rooms, each with 4 racks, 3 shelves on each, each shelf with 50 manila folders? Inside one folder, do you keep a wormhole to the 2nd bedroom in apartment 1409 in the building 2 doors down from the apartment building I first mentioned? I think having levels of folders is a good idea, each level with different names, e.g. 4 levels: house, room, shelf, and folder.

by corford 14y ago

kokey 14y ago

I think it's highly dependent on the type of person, or family. For example I have had to help many people track down their documents which are somewhere in a download or documents folder. I, personally, am not the kind of person who sorts my paperwork into folders. Neither, like some people, do I organise every single e-mail into a folder. Gmail has understood this well, and makes it easier to find what I want. I find it much easier to make sure I know _when_ something happened, I make sure I e-mail myself notes, and copies of documents, but most of the time it happens by itself anyway, so I can search for them in Gmail. For example if I want to find some paperwork done when we moved into a new house, I can track down the date in Gmail, and know in which box to go dig it up. Most of the time what I need has an e-mail record somewhere. That said, I strongly support allowing people to approach the problem from both sides, chronological with good tagging/searching or being able to organise things into folders in a way they like. People work in different ways. However, I think the default is to be disorganised, and the best way to deal with being disorganised is to keep it as simple as possible.

prof_hobart 14y ago

But physical paper has basic restrictions that digital media doesn't - like lack of easily searchable metadata, and being able to be in multiple groups at one time. My photos (many thousands of them) are stored in folders by date, but I pretty much never search them that way. I use Lightroom, which automaticaly puts basic stuff like date in there, and allows me to tag every photo with things location, themes, people, ratings etc. It also allows me to put them into (multiple, if I want) groups. And it's combinations of these things that I use to locate my photos - e.g. all the photos of my daughter in Berlin in 2008. My music is little different - I might fancy listening to a specific album, or a random bunch of jazz tracks or whatever. I get to them through my music app, not through the filesystem. Some other stuff still relies more on basic directory structures, but that's only because I've not found a suitable set of tools that provide me with a full metadata approach just yet. And yes, a lot of people would probably initially struggle with moving away from directories and over to a metadata-based world, but that's more to do with the fact that it's what they are currently used to than it being a fundamentally better approach.

super_mario 14y ago
And just because two files are in different folders you can't still tag them and make them part of the bigger concept? In fact with folders and tagging you are getting the best of both worlds.
- prof_hobart 14y ago
  I didn't say that you couldn't tag them if they are in folders. My point is that a fixed directory structure is pretty much irrelevant to how I usually want to manage/search my photos etc - it adds pretty much nothing to what I can manage far more flexibly through the metadata.
  - super_mario 14y ago
    Except when searching by metadata doesn't find what you want. Or when it finds too much. This is now 99% case for me when I use spotlight. I have a huge library of PDF books (tens of gigabytes). If I search for a bunch of keywords or even if I know entire title, the damn spotlight returns way too many irrelevant results. Now I could perhaps spend 10 - 20 seconds thinking about how to write a more specific query, but it's faster to actually go to ~/Reference/Computer Science/CS Theory/ and get right to my damn book, which I know will be there based on how I structured my filesystem and the topic the book covers. This has in fact gotten worse since snow leopard, before the default was to show file name matches first then content matches. So if you want a book on algorithms, almost all CS theory books will match. You have to type filename:"book title" to be more specific. Now one could argue that Spotlight should get better. But I'm arguing that you will always encounter cases where it will be really difficult to find what you want, even if you know a lot about what you are searching, let alone if you vaguely remember a detail about what you want to find. But by being able to restrict what you are looking for you will have better luck. Searching for photos is much easier, because photos are binary content, so apart from EXIF there is not much to look for in there. But if you have documents with plain text or searchable content like PDFs, things get a lot worse.

ZoFreX 14y ago

From what I've seen on the computers I've used, non-technical people seem to have far better filing systems in general. My mum and dad both organise their files and emails impeccably, whereas my file structure is so badly organised I can literally lose files for years before rediscovering them like an archeologist on a dig.

bradwestness 14y ago
They also likely have a much lower volume of files to manage, being non-technical and all. I could probably get by with the single folder level at home, where I mostly just browse the internet and watch video on my PC, but having to manage all my various projects at work would be a nightmare. How are you supposed to check out a source code repository? Many frameworks require things to be in a specific folder structure in order to work.

vorg 14y ago

> At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc. Inside one of the manila folders, do you keep an apartment building, with 12 floors, each floor with 20 apartments, each apartment with 3 rooms, each with 4 racks, 3 shelves on each, each shelf with 50 manila folders? Inside one folder, do you keep a wormhole to the 2nd bedroom in apartment 1409 in the building 2 doors down from the apartment building I first mentioned? I think having levels of folders is a good idea, each level with different names, e.g. 4 levels: house, room, shelf, and folder.