How Do You Organize Your Data? 713
kpellegr asks: "After returning from a well deserved holiday, I was faced with an exploding inbox. While organizing and deleting my mail, I realised I was having trouble classifying each mail into one specific folder. I had the feeling I should be able to link to one email from several folders (e.g. product information should be linked to from the 'vendor' folder, as well as from a specific project folder where this product is used). The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data, but I have the feeling data could be organized more efficiently. How does the Slashdot crowd organize their data? How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?"
Virtual Folders (Score:5, Interesting)
Inefficiently (Score:5, Interesting)
But seriously, this subject is kind of lacking. The problem I have with organized storage is keeping it organized. I don't have the time nor the will. I need some sort of automagic organization.
Home Directory (Score:3, Interesting)
On Windows, it's slightly different. I save everything to my desktop, then when it gets 'full,' I delete just about everything, realizing I no longer need it.
Not that I RECOMMEND these strategies, but it works.
Don't worry, already solved (Score:3, Interesting)
The good news is, that while the Window's file system may not support this, if you wait until 2005 (2006, 2007?), this highly demanded feature will be in the next release of Windows -- yes, everyone's favourite Longhorn will turn everything into a database.
Frankly, I don't think turning an OS into a DBMS is the right thing to do, but for certain applications, having this functionality omnipresent will be useful. Well, OK, for this one application, I'm still waiting to see examples of others.
Archaeological Filing system (Score:5, Interesting)
It was based on the simple principal that the older something was the further down in the pile it would be.
Your all-in-one-folder technique and "ls -t" would work equally well.
Well, (Score:2, Interesting)
Disclaimer: This works in theory; practically it would require a hell of a lot of resources.
The basic idea would be a relational database. You've got say the files in one table, and categories in another. The categories can have a parent, so you get something of a tree view going. Then, when you select something from a tree view, it comes up with all items from that category.
Creating this would be easy; optimizing it wouldn't be.
homedir (Score:3, Interesting)
i wish my view of the system was more abstracted. i'd rather have my homedir as
another thing i wish, though, is that the filesystem were more... i dont know what to call it. but i wish i could store more meta data about my files. i wish my filesystem had a comments field, and i wish that doing a directory listing would spit out file attributes like dimensions, content length, number of words, and whatever other stuff i could glean by hand. i just want it to all show up. hell, i wish i could do a recursive directory listing based on file type, not file name. and not based on the extension... cause who says i use extensions? (of course i do, what are you, daft?!) unless its a text file. unix spoiled me and i dont put extensions on those.
heck. i wish there was a way to just export my entire home directory with everything i said into one giant 22 gigabyte compressed file that i can save somewhere, drop into a new computer, and just be up and running again just like that.
that's what an administrative assistant is for (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I try to keep different partitions set for specific things, this helps in case something gets borked on one drive, it won't mess up other partitions, of course there are backups made to ensure not much is lost.
Try doing something like this (if on *nix)
- /dev/hda3
/home/$USERNAME/pers (personal stuff like diaries or so)
- /dev/hda4
/home/$USERNAME/codes (if you're a programmer)
- /dev/hda5
/home/$USERNAME/music (take a guess)
Get the picture? The good thing about this setup is, one could always umount in case someone gets physical access to the machine, heck it could be scripted to mount and unmount on login and logout. Or you could encrypt the partitions for added security.At first it looks bulky, but in the end it's very easy to maintain since everything tends to fall in place. e.g. If you're scripting you could just cd /home/$USERNAME/code and not have to wonder where to save this. Unless you're really odd (like me) and begin everything with test.c or test.py or something.
Maybe no folders could do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
All mail are kept into one place (say, a MySQL database). You, however, setup filters (that is, SQL queries) that show your e-mails in virtual folders.
That is, messages can be in as many folders as they meet the selection criterion of.
In addition to the obvious "from", "date", "subject", you could assign an arbitrary number of categories which could constitute more selection criteria.
Scopeware and Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
On a less lofty, but free, note, Evolution has "virtual folders" in which you can place anything a filter expression can select. I use them to sort my email by sender address. I still have my main inbox, and all the categorized subfolders, but the virtual folders select particular people out of the massive mail database. So I can recall that Joe said something three weeks ago that relates to a current problem, and look in the "Joe" virtual folder to find it. There's still no easy way to add arbitrary messages to a virtual folder, other than adding a filter rule that selects just that one message. At least I haven't found a way. But it seems to address part of your concern, for email at least.
Re:Archaeological Filing system (Score:5, Interesting)
alias recent='ls -lt | head'
Chaos is the best Organization (Score:5, Interesting)
Or is that KAOS (as in "Get Smart") ?
I'm currently playing around with putting all my mail messages, bookmarks, web pages loaded, file accesses (on a day to day basis) into a database. Maybe not all the actual data, but the stuff that might help me find it when I need it. I'm hoping to eventually scan everything that changes on my computer or that I do for keywords and so on and then organize them so I can browse them by some kind of visual graph/map metaphor on any of several axes (type of file, date/time, keywords, directory ....).
I want to be able to go in with a query like "sometime in july I did something having to do with a picnic and watermelon" and get a list of possibilities, then be able to rate those in the hopes of finding the exact info I'm looking for.
OK, so far I only have some pieces of it. But I'm getting closer to a database schema for the information and that will help me figure out better what info I need to collect.
Intertwingle (Score:4, Interesting)
As many people will probably point here, you should check out Evolution's "virtual folders".
JWZ once proposed a more sophisticated approach to store mail without the hierarchical folder structure limits. You can read about it here: Intertwingle [mozilla.org]
I don't what came out of that. I think it is a good idea still waiting to be implemented.
Evolution's Create Filter on Message is Key (Score:5, Interesting)
My goal is to never have an email that has value to me land in my inbox. Every time I get an email of "value" which stays in Evolution's inbox, I right click, and "Create Filter from Message". (I'm paraphrasing.)
Every good message should have at least one filter putting it into at least one folder. Some emails have more than one rule, but the whole right click -> create filter thing makes this quick and easy.
-Pete
RT (Score:3, Interesting)
Anti SCO T-Shirts [anti-tshirts.com]. Donates to the Open Source Now Fund with each purchase.
Re:Agreed... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Link-To feature allows me to store it in multiple folders at once.
I especially appreciate the Shared-Folder. It makes it easier for me to make emails, documents, etc, available to those that haven't a clue. The IT department is busy working on too many other things and the Novell iFolder is unacceptable for my use (my other option).
I wish I could make subfolders under Search Folders but that's for another version maybe.
Just my worthless
grep (Score:4, Interesting)
Keeping email organized is a lot harder than it should be. There is no good way to deal with things like a seminar announcement that I need to keep for two weeks but is junk after that, or stuff that I need to remember to read or reply to but don't want to read right now (or stuff I keep because I should read it but don't want to actually read ever).
It is also hard to remember that, when someone emails me some document, the place to store it is not in an email folder, but a directory dedicated to that project or subject. Like if someone sends a reference for a paper I am writing, it should go in ~/papers/journalname/papername/references or something, not just stay as an attachment in my inbox.
And once in a while, you have to waste a day or two reorganizing your crap and deleting old email. This is especially hard when I have copies of documents or programs on different computers, because I have to figure out which ones are the most recent and are the authoritative copy. CVS and rsync help here; CVS makes it obvious which copy is the best one (the one in CVS), and rsync makes it easy to keep things identical on different machines so you don't have the problem to begin with.
What was the question? Oh yeah. Let google index your entire file tree and use it to find stuff.
Haystack from MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Virtual Folders (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a Good Thing IMHO. But, I find that abstract views are almost as good. I'd love spend my time contriving useful query-based views of my mail (e.g. select * from ~/mail where address like family and pr0n = false and spam = no) rather than doing some other things [1] but alas. Fortunately there is the 'in the file system' approach that Hans Reiser [namesys.com] and crew are working toward. Files as directories of content/properties, indexes built from custom searches on transactional filesystems. And all of it open to tinkering and improvement. The UNIX 'file-os-ophy' of text files and meta-data would make my ideal open and convoluted mail storage system trivial.
Worried about space? Run it through transparent filesystem level compression. Worried about security? Gpg ain't exactly new. Want more meta data? No problem: the filesystem of the future has plenty of flexibility for your X-Hot-Natalie-Portman-With-Grits field.
[1] One of the few things tying me to M$ right now is the preponderance of custom sorted, property-extended email stuck in M$ proprietary formats. If I have to write another shell script to parse MBX, PST or OST formats...I think I'll scream.
Do it the BeOS way... (Score:2, Interesting)
1.msg [ classification=Spam ]
2.msg [ classification=Inbox,classification=Spam ]
The desktop interface let you sort out files based on their attributes. Better e-mail clients also understood some of the common file attributes.
Linux now has attribute based filesystems that are getting mature - it should be possible to do something similar.
A DYI solution, but what on Linux isn't? (:
The Brain (Score:1, Interesting)
www.thebrain.com
It has an interesting way of organizing data - and you can link any data item from multiple places. It is a very interesting idea and I have played with it some. It can link to Lotus notes messages as well.
One disadvantage is that (besides the Windows platform) that it is the entire environment you'll "live in", with your data. I bought it at work and tried it out, and the first impressions are good. If the company has a broadbased support and widespread adoption, I'd probably use it, because at work we seem to be keeping the M$ platform for at least a few more years.
You can check out the personal version free of charge - download from the website.
how much email your mail app can handle (Score:3, Interesting)
Somewhat at a loss for good ideas, I suggested she try Enterage. That's apparently what they used to use, until they broke its limit of a 2mb index, at which point Enterage crashes.
Sheeeeeeesh. Some people just don't know what it means to keep a clean email inbox. But in her case, their business revolves around receiving customer email, and they're already keeping their mailboxes trimmed down.
Is there any email app for OS X that can handle "industrial" needs?
Just to Stir the Pot (Score:3, Interesting)
Ted Nelson's ZigZag [xanadu.com] system is a new way to store related data without resorting to a relational database. At first glance, it seems really goofy. This is usually an indication (to me, anyway) that it either really is completely goofy, or brilliant beyond my comprehension. Given Nelson's record, I'm inclined toward the latter.
Schwab
Re:Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Ugh... hate to say it... Outlook client using exchange.
There I said it. Ok, to be fair, I use it because that is what is available and that is what everyone is use, all 800 or so of us... and that is in our org, which is a child org to a much larger org... so a total userbase of about 6000 users...
Here's why it works. I use partially Bayesian based InBoxer [programurl.com] to kill spam. Our exchange server also runs Norton anti-virus (which has saved us from SoBig all that crap)... and then the exchange also has a spam filter which adds "spam:" to the subject of all incoming know spam e-mails (which does me not much good).
Ok, that takes care of spam. All list-serves I belong to get put into their own folders... Emails for friends get put into a specific folder. This leaves my inbox. My inbox is shared with all my 'trusted' co workers. When I am gone, they check it on a regular basis for me while I am gone. If I am expecting a high priority e-mail from a certain person, I set it up so an alert e-mail is sent to the right person then that comes in.
For my tasks, that is also shared. When I am gone, I forward my tasks that are due during that period to the right person.
My calander is also shared. On my calender, I mark when I will be gone, and then setup a special list of those who should be alert when they send me an e-mail or task during that period (this stops an e-mail alert being sent to those list-serves I am on when I am gone).
As for files: I manage the share on our central server that we all use. We just went through a major undertaking to get it up to par. ALL files are saved on the server. Everyone has a private drive, and then each 'task' or 'subject' or 'project' has its own folder on the server. Some folders are public, or 'all on our domain'... a majority are 'departmental access' (every one in our small org)... the rest are specific, generally with 3-4 people.
It takes work. But I have access to the files I need and so do the other people in my org. It takes a lot of user education, training, and hand holding.
Couple all this with decent VPN (cisco based) and most users get what they need when they need it.
Oh, and this is at a college. Most departments are as well off as we are. And, yes, slammer has been a bitch to deal with as students move in... but many dedicated staff have solved that problem (not to mention some ingenious network guys... hats off!).
Re:Archaeological Filing system (Score:3, Interesting)
This system works for me. I usually remember about when I received something so I stand a very great chance of finding it by doing a chronological search. I never delete anything that is not an obvious spam. I do make copies of some things into appropriate folders, but I want the chronological record intact so that nothing can get lost by being missfiled.
I do, however, make a point of regularly moving things off the server and onto the local HD and then later move it onto CD.
To avoid losing data you need at least one index that is complete and uncorrupted. If you move emails willy nilly into folders based on whatever whim it seems to apply to. You will spend much more time thinking of which of the various issues or persons the email applied to or came from then you would use doing an educated search of a large list with a known key such as date received.
I find that using even a primitive search tool such as the human brain I can usualy find things pretty quickly. Pick two well remembered emails that you think you know came before and after the one you think your looking for or pick two dates that you believe it lies within. If possible limit the search to one sender. Recursively narrow your search parameters.
depends a bit on your mail client (Score:3, Interesting)
If there is product specific stuff that I want to put in more than one place, I tend to copy it to text or word or whatever format docs and save it into folders.
Now I am entirely dependant on filters to store stuff into the right folder. Usually all that is left in the inbox is spam or new contacts.
There are things for sales or support staff called "contact managers" or "customer resource managers" (CRM), which let you link up documents and mail and even records of phone conversations and reminders in a more intuitive fashion. I've yet to decide which one is best even though I've spent months trying to figure it out. I guess it is too far away from how I work as a programmer (mostly). There are these ones for example: Le Grand [slashdot.org]
ACT! [act.com]
Microsoft have one that they got from Great Plains software [microsoft.com]
And there is one unix based one that I know of in Finland! Nemein [nemein.com] Hmm, having trouble getting it to load but it was there last January. Try looking for Nemein.Net Sales just to prove I'm not imagining it review [lwn.net]
Anyway I think some of those things are completely over the top but if your email systems are out of control they may help.
The Brain (Score:4, Interesting)
Opera's Email (Score:2, Interesting)
Some suggestions for Email and Filesystems (Score:2, Interesting)
Get Lotus Notes. I am a Domino evagelist. It is my god! I will spare you the details, but the Domino server and Notes client is the same as
Next Filesystem:
Linux boxes are highly organized already so for Win/Dos/OS2 systems:
Create an OS partition. Only install the OS and patches and device drivers here.
Create an Application partition. Install all applications in a heirarchy starting with Apps and Games and branch apps into Office, Development, Graphics, Utils, MediaPlayback, etc.
Create a Data partition. Create a \Data and a \Temp. Under TEMP put a Downloads, CDBurnoff, Ripping, Testing, and Receipts & Status. Under Data put Documents, Media, Source, Settings, and Pictures.
That should get you started. Create a catalog.txt file and put it on your desktop with notes about where everything should go. Good luck scaling up to 200 GB and keeping your head from exploding!!
BeOS File system (Score:4, Interesting)
It's rather awkward to explain, but it works amazingly well in practice. Once you've tried it, you realise that there is no need to store data in directories, just make sure that the attributes are up-to-date, and finding any file is a query away. Rumour has it that Windows will adopt a similar system in Longhorn. Yeah, we BeOS users (all 20 of us
Ditch the folders... (Score:4, Interesting)
"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context." ZOE [evectors.it]
grepmail on Unix, zoe on OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/
If you have OS X check out Zoe:
http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/
Bayes with good interface (Score:3, Interesting)
IMO it did this in real-time, must have made for some impressive indices.
Maybe this is the answer, open-source Autonomy. I am a mere perlmonks acolyte so I will leave it up to the real brains to figure it out
Re:Just to Stir the Pot (Score:2, Interesting)
theBrain (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always classified thebrain as 'really neat', but not very usable. Once you put a lot of information into it, the interface becomes difficult to use. But the concpet is still sound.
Storage Organization Scheme (Score:2, Interesting)
Under the Win32 folder I have a scheme of Applications, Gaming, Drivers, Servers, etc... Under Linux I have a scheme similar to Source, Binaries, Modules, etc...
Once I decided on that organization model it was really easy to just keep expanding the same principle to subdirectories.
Re:Haystack from MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope to see this progress. I'd spend $100 in the blink of an eye for a decent home-use information management tool. (Having used industrial-strength [and priced] document management in the past...) At the moment though, Haystack looks a little bit scary.
Requirements from the download [mit.edu] page:
*Pentium III 700mhz-based computer or better (Pentium 4 2ghz strongly recommended)
*512 megabytes of RAM (768 megabytes strongly recommended)
*Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Linux (Linux build requires GTK+ 2.0 libraries)
*At least 1 gigabyte of disk space (or more, as your repository grows)
*Java 2 Development Kit (JDK) 1.4
If I had a test box with these specs, yes, I'd try it.
Re:grepmail on Unix, zoe on OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
Win2k SP2, jre 1.4.0, IE 6.0.2600.0000
MacOSX 10.1.3, jre 1.4.1, IE 5.1.3 (3905)
MacOSX 10.1.4, jre 1.4.1, IE 5.1.4 (4415.2)
MacOSX 10.1.4, jre 1.4.1, Mozilla 0.9.9
MacOSX 10.2.5, jre 1.4.1, Safari 1.0
Debian 'Stable' Linux, blackdown 1.3sdk, Opera
WinFS (Score:3, Interesting)
So you'll access a "folder" which basically has a list of properties, and all files with those properties will be show. So if I want all my pictures from my vacation to hawaii, as well as my monthly financial reports, I'd create a folder that "contains" all files on those subjects, and whenever I accessed that folder it'd show me all files that fit those catagories. But on the same hand I can have another "folder" which shows me just my vacation pictures.
Sets, not trees (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/sets1.htm (I know, geocities sucks, but there are too many links to it already to switch.)
Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to create new folders for specific types of email, but I found it very difficult to manage and search all the folders after a while, so I ended up moving all of my email to a single folder, Inbox. I currently have 24,949 messages in my Inbox and Evolution is still extremely fast when it comes to sorting and searching through them all.
I also make use of the excellent VFolders feature of Evolution, to save frequent searches into their own folders. I've been using Evolution now for several years, and it just keeps getting better and better [ximian.com].
Re:Virtual Folders (Score:3, Interesting)
OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and more (Score:5, Interesting)
For file systems I use symbolic links in a column viewed filesytem. I really like what a company formerly known as NeXT [apple.com] has done with some of their products. Their software for pictures and music both have a "Library". From there you can drag songs or pictures into "Playlists" (music) or "Albums" (photos).
Very cool.
As for software, I use OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner from OmniGroup [omnigroup.com]. OmniOutliner is especially simple, yet unique. I wonder why no one else has an idea organizer that is so incredible? I couldn't do my job without it. Well, I could, but I'd use a lot of paper or spend a lot of time in OpenOffice messing around with things.
Lotus Notes does it for me (Score:2, Interesting)
The only down side to Notes is that it's quite expensive, but it does run on Linux *grins*
Z
Lesson from Libraries: faceted classification (Score:1, Interesting)
I use faceted classification to name my folders. Specifically, I use a variant of Ranganathan's Colon Classification. Each folder has four facets applied to it: Matter, Energy, Space, and Time. Ranganathan also specified a Personality facet but I can never figure it out. Instead, I assign a proper noun. The Time facet is also redundant given the time stamp on the files. Instead, I replace Time with Stage.
So, here's a typical folder name for a sales project I'm working on:
Personality- Smith (name of company)
Energy- Sales (activity related to contents)
Matter- Presentation
Space- Montreal
Time- Stage 3
The resulting folder name is: Smith_presentation_sales_montreal_3
It looks like ass, but it works pretty well since the facets are semantically orthogonal. The syntax makes searching and sorting pretty simple.
Good luck!
A Combination of Folders, Piles, & Stored Sear (Score:2, Interesting)
The concept of piles, I love as well, the ability to just quickly dump things into piles of interest, that can be later organized better, is a great concept. Typically when something is active it need to be related to lots of other things, and for me the piles concept allows this. Of course this brings me to stored searches.
I find I used the concept of stored searches like data mining. I typically do it for past projects, or to gain new insight on past experiences. I remember Sherlock use to allow you to save search criteria as a clickable link that would then rerun and update the results when selected. I don't think the new version does, but I am hoping that Apple will introduce the opportunity to do so, when they start making improvements on the new finder to be introduced in Panther.
Re:Scopeware and Evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, I am going to get called a Zealot or troll for saying this, but these kinds of things are generally the "navigational" structures of the 1960's databases. Dr. Codd formulated relational theory to clean up just such structures. Anything that has tons of nodes/records is eventually going to need a database or database-like capabilities. Database experts have generally solved (or at least heavily explored) these kinds of problems. Relational is generally the almost-hands-down champion of massive data handling (OODBMS being the only mentioned competitor).
I agree that current RDBMS products have some deficiencies for such purposes, but this is mostly the fault of specific vendors, not relational theory.
Further, there are some cases where relational does not shine very well. However, I see nothing in file/email organization that exposes those weaknesses. (Except maybe text-indexing, which can easily be integrated with relational.)
I beleive the solutions already exist in relational technology. It is mostly a matter of adaptation for different purposes and getting people unhooked from tree-centric thinking. (In another message, I link to ideas for item-finding user interfaces.)
Re:that's easy (Score:4, Interesting)
porn2
New Folder
New Folder(1)
unsorted_porn
mp3s
I made the mistake of making too many partitions on my drive. So my porn on my
I'm sure I've got all this porn stashed away somewhere on some random partition on my drive that has no links pointing to it, so I'll never find it. I love it when I do find a 1GB stash of
Check out Zoe (Score:3, Interesting)
It is wonderfully easy to use, and does everything you want. Oh, it does take a bit of getting used to.
Ximian Evolution's VFolders (Score:2, Interesting)
A simple example is creating a VFolder that will show all items flagged "Important", allowing you to immediately view and modify any such email. Any changes you make to messages within a VFolder applies to that actual message, wherever it resides, kind of like a hard-link.
Re:WinFS (Score:4, Interesting)
Great -- now I can lose my "files" that much faster.
Stickies? Apple's
Threaded via highlighting (in today's version -- just wait) with Apple's Mail.app is nice too.
The key is that *I* will still have to organize and be able to find easily my data (instead of ALWAYS doing a "search" I suppose). This file system, that file system -- it's still a tree'ing directory structure (logically at least). With symbolic links (Un*x) I can easily cross link anything. Sure -- a database is good for doing that concept too. WinFS isn't the end all be all considering their work to date and what is already on the market with Linux and OS X.
Either way, here or there, that OS or the other, which ever file system *I* will have to organize -- Microsoft is only trying to dummy things down even MORE. What's next, macro enabled file system virus' that infect and wipe out my entire "database"? Oh, wait, we already have that.
Flame bait attempt? Certainly not. This certainly didn't answer the question. My answer has been to Folder/File emails according to project, as needed. The names always change. Eventually simply "dated" and burned or deleted as needed. Of course Apple's current searching functions across all their applications is extraordinary and will only get that much better with Panther. How many more years until Longhorn?
Heck, with Linux, or BSD, or even OS X for that matter a simple "find . -print | grep -i whatever_i_think_it_could_be" will do a fast and dirty search. Doesn't really work too well with Windows, now does it?
Use keywords (Score:3, Interesting)
the same way while organising, as while looking for something. I never seem to find
the right folder when I want it.
So now I am using evolution, put all mails (except SPAM, CVS, Bug reports etc) in INBOX
folder and create virtual folders based on keywords. But most of my successful hits are
when I filter for keywords over this INBOX folder as I need info. Its works 90% of the time.
Infact another rule in conjunction to this: Never delete anything
I am next going to break my INBOX into separate folder for each 3-months and try doing the
filters over the whole set of inboxes.
3 Personal Tmp Directories to Eliminate Clutter (Score:3, Interesting)
The most USEFUL directories you can create are three personal tmp directories, like so:
- tmp
- tmpSep
- tmp2003
When you do that, you instantly get rid of clutter: small files that you don't really care about, but want to keep for some finite amount of time.There are many more techniques. I'd like to write about them some time, but now is not that time.
Sorting Files (Score:3, Interesting)
The base directory describes the block.
Take for example software. There are two possible ways of sorting this: stuff from vendors and stuff by structure. I use both, but the majority of stuff gets stored in the vendor tree, and the minority under the opsys tree. So if i want a non-descript OS/2 utility for file management, i would look under opsys/os2/fileman/ while something from say file commander/2 [which i use a lot] is /vendor/fileman/harvard/os2/.
Personal stuff gets stored under the tdisk tree. These are grouped under broad catergories, eg 'maths', and then a date directory. eg: /tdisk/maths/nbfk/
The whole idea is if ye take a bucket-load of backup cdroms, ye should get a single tree that is easy to sort through.
Windows Future Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Plug (Score:2, Interesting)
The idea is to "attach" qualifiers to data, so that the data doesn't have to be ordered in a hierarchical way. The data is looked for dynamically, as the system creates a tree structure on the fly, based on the qualifiers the user has attached to the data.
Example: A novel on the history of mathematics would by one user be stored in the folder "History" and another user would look for it in "Science". The ICMS solution lets the user attach "History", "Science" and "Novel" to the book, so that he himself (and other users) can find the book by looking in the folder "History" AND/OR "Novel" AND/OR "Science".
Neat eh?
(If you're interested in buying anything from them, contact me at mathieu.dhondt at quatris.be - I'll give you a discount).
The world is not a hierarchy (Score:3, Interesting)
I organize my emails by putting everything in a single folder. No need to agonise over classification or get grumpy at myself for misfiling. Then I use ISYS [isys.com.au] to find whatever I need to find, using a plain english description of my need. Works a treat. ISYS is a swiss army knife search tool, but best of all, there's a stripped-down, email-only version coming out in a couple of weeks.
Re:An aging user interface metaphor (Score:3, Interesting)
Computers have advanced well into what were just dreams even in the 1980s. But we are still stuck with many of the paradigms that were created to:
- Make computers useful when they were very slow.
- Make computers understandable to people who did not grow up with them.
Today, many of the concepts should be obsolete, but I have not heard of any real advancements other than finding uses for the better bandwidth. So I started a company to develop what will hopefully be the next step.
I believe you need to understand both the old fast relational database paradigm, and the newer but slower document-based database paradigm to be able to see what comes next. Luckily, most techies hate Lotus Notes. The former secretaries and managers who do work with it have little concept of how revolutionary it is; they just like that they can understand it. I hope this leaves the field open for me and my company to become in the next 10 years what Oracle was back around 1990. Wish me luck, or try to compete. Either way technology will advance.
Multi-value fields (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Virtual Folders (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, the good old days of Assign on AmigaOS..
assign mods: dh0:/mods
assign mods: dh1:/mods ADD
By writing list mods: you could now see the contents of both those directories as if it was one single directory. And it's been available even since the first version of AmigaOS.
There's nothing quite as simple and neat on any other OS, even today =(
Good, Easy (Score:2, Interesting)
i use a relational database with a web front end. (Score:2, Interesting)
here's the skinny. i store files in a tree based on their checksum. so the file with the checksum a23f55abab... would be stored like this:
then i store pointers to this file in a database along with different metadata (mimetype, original file name, keywords, mount point (set1), etc). then i define lists based on queries to the database.
so i could have a list like:
images::vacation::italy 2001
the images would have keywords like
italy, vacation, 2001
and the query defining that list would look something like:
keywords:vacation and
keywords:italy and
keywords:2001 and
mime_type:image
i need to commit this stuff to the CVS, but it seems to work.
Re:Archaeological Filing system (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't be able to sleep wondering what important files I forgot to tag as "never-expire", the pressure would be too much and I would end up tagging EVERYTHING to "never-expire", as well as cronning a job to tag everything to never-expire everyday just before midnight, just in case...
Oh, and I'd have that script send me a text message when it's done, just to keep me calm at night...
No seriously, you're talking about erasing stuff automatically, I, personally, wouldn't think that to be a good idea.
Re:that's easy (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a good reason to make that a separate partition.
And having
Re:that's easy (Score:3, Interesting)
You're too right about that one!
For tha very reason, I have the same justification for
Re:that's easy (Score:3, Interesting)
How I organize data (Score:2, Interesting)
So, for email, I keep folders to a minimum of about 6. But because time is so important, I tier those, so that anything older than a week goes into a mirror folder structure under OLD. Then anything older than a month is moved into ARCHIVE. And the archive stuff is compressed, so I have to really want to look at it.
Loose information is another problem, with a simple index-card like solution. A lot of the information we need is small, like "joe's phone number", and doesn't warrant a whole file. For that I actually throw all the information into a single big file, where each datum is one line (grep-able). The information has no structure. I often cut and paste random stuff. Then I have a search that just pulls out entries which match all terms:For filesystems, I found the reiser guys have some very pertinent ideas, albeit in need of further development. http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html [namesys.com]For shared stuff, I really like having an unofficial document system, and my favorite is The Moin Moin Wiki [sourceforge.net] because it's fairly simple to use and install.
Re:Personal Brain 3.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Big downsides however are
1. It is not free software.
2. It uses a proprietary data format, which remains unpublished. This means that your data is locked up and only accesible through the proprietary software it was created under.
These two points constitute a contract I am not willing to accept and thus I do not use nor would I recommend this product.