Actually I don't care for any kind of organization for personal files. I just search. I have my _really_ important files that are cumbersome to recreate like a

Actually I don't care for any kind of organization for personal files. I just search. I have my _really_ important files that are cumbersome to recreate like a <50kb jpg of my signature for those annoying forms, scans of my identity cards, etc, in ~/Documents/important I have my to-read stuff in ~/Documents/books All my other files are slammed together in ~/Downloads. I search through the folder using everything.exe (on windows) or fsearch(on linux). That already covers the 90% case, and for the rest recoll maintains a search index that even stores file contents (including zip,pdf,xml-based stuff like office files). It works well. These days I hear everything.exe itself supports searching within files. On the other hand, I'm really picky about properly hierarchically organizing code files in any SW project I do, and proper hierarchical organizing of the app folder of any app I make. As for tags, the only reason I see myself using them is for pictures. It can enable a deterministic version of Google photos search. But I'm happy with Google photos search for now.