I keep a working directory of everything that's relevant to my day-to-day right now. That folder is chaos but it's easy to keep mental track of it because it's

I keep a working directory of everything that's relevant to my day-to-day right now. That folder is chaos but it's easy to keep mental track of it because it's small. Once something is no longer relevant (that project ends, I've shared that photo, I've cooked that recipe, I've listened to that album etc) then stuff goes into the archive. Within the archive I group everything by year. Then within the year I'll subdivide by project/event and then by document type. So the archive looks something like: 2014 pics_from_my_phone project_a .doc .pdf .ppt project_b downloaded_music album_a track_1.mp3 album_b ... 2013 pics_from_my_phone project_c ... 2012 project_d project_e ... Having suffered from catastrophic data loss in the past I usually store the archive redundantly on different physical drives and cloud services, and sync the backups every few days.