this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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I found this a few months ago and after adapting it to my needs I now have my files heavily organized (makes backups much easier).
https://github.com/roboyoshi/datacurator-filetree
What exactly is the app? The GitHub page isn't the most descriptive. How does it help you with backups?
It's not an app, it's actually a very simple repo containing folders and readmes.
It's just a folder structure, which you can use on your system. Unzip the file and slowly fill the folders with your files. I had to create(or maybe even rename/delete) some folders to adapt it to my needs. It took me around 20days during summer to organize around 2-3tb of my laptop and my external disk.
It was a kinda painful manual process, but I think it was really worth it, now things are well organized, I detected and removed hunderds of GB of unecessary/duplicate/unwanted files, it's easier to navigate now, the structure is cleaner and syncing a big part of my drive is relatively easy now. There some files, like installed programs and their data which are in predefined paths and I didnt move those, so these were left out. Also some games save their data in Documents, so I symlinked their data in documents. And there's the defauly downloads folder which is now more of a temporary folder for stuff I download before I move them or delete them.
There is not exactly a standard for how to orginize your files, but this repo is a very good start:)
Edit: I think organizing my files was my first step on the list in order to transition to linux, it would otherwise make it harder to properly backup and sync a mess of files gathering up for years. To sync my files to my external drive I just had to backup only ~10folders and one of which was the "root" (the one in the repo as you can see) which contained about 90% of my files. Much easier, much faster.
Taking a look now. This seems largely pretty smart. I am curious though, how much of the folder structure here felt relevant for you? For me I'm thinking it's ~50%. I agree with you though, that it's a good starting point. I was working on something similar in a text file a while back but never finished. Turns out, organization is pretty hard when you have collected data for 25 years.
Ok, umm, I sent a lengthy response with screenshots and a dirlist to see, somehow it didnt get sent. I'll send it again later, but it will probably take me 4hours, gonna be busy for a little while😅
(To answer your question, this structure holds around 96% of my user data.)
Oh, dang. I appreciate that effort. Sorry that it went into the void!
Ok, so, it takes about 96% of the data in the home partition. Here are some screenshots of Qdirstat scans of my laptop's 1tb ssd:
~/:~/root/:Many of the files here are flac files and some ancient movies I have. 😄
Also, this is a (censored) directory list of top 3 levels of the
rootstructure (I have put some unecessary dirs inObsolete-dirsinstead of deleting them and many dirs here are either empty or near-empty, like the book categories or the chart dirs):root
Btw, I have separate root, home and boot partitons on my nixos install, here's the root partition:
/:Lastly, the external hdd I have isn't that organized, because many of the backup folder aren't inside the root folder. I think putting them inside the /root/backup/ path would be the proper way, but this would probably break my backup workflow and mess with a script I have to sync my phone. I might do it one time:)
Thank you so much for this! You've given me a lot of ideas. Last question, I think you mentioned symlinking -- can you say more about how you are using symlinks? (I am familiar with the concept but maybe haven't used them how you have for a purpose like this)
Hehe, glad I helped:)
I havan't yet used a lot of symlinking, but some of the stuff I do is:
If you can see the dirlist, in
~/root/Imports-Exports/BottlesI have the bottles dir which contains 2 subdirs,Bottles-AppsandBottles-Games. They are symlinks, pointing to bottles of apps (at~/root/Software/Applications/Linux/Bottles-Apps) and games (at~/root/Games/Video/Computer/linux/Bottles-Games) respectively (bottles are wine prefixes that the app "Bottles" creates to run windows programs).This one is again about windows games. I have the program files and data in 2 separate folder under
~/root/Games/Video/Computer/windows/GameX(whereGameXrepresents a given game) and I symlink them inside the respective bottle dirs (2 of the games I have use the defaultDocumentsdir for saving the game data and because I dont have bottles isolated from the rest of the userspace, I symlinked the game data in~/Documents).Because nixos uses symlinks for its app shortcuts, simply dragging app icons on the desktop doesnt work (it creates symlinks to the version of the app at this time). Thus, I have to go to nixos's folder with shortcuts to my apps (which gets updated after update) and symlink each shortcut to my desktop.
Another use for symlinks is to keep my dotfiles git versioned and sycned with codeberg, for which I'll have to use gnu stow, but I still haven't done this (my git knowledges are veery limited).
You can do fun stuff, just be careful when copying/deleting/syncing symlinks, not to mess up anything (app tend to warn you if you want to follow the symlink (which affects the targeted file instead of the symlink) or not). They help to keep things tidy, but can get messy with improper use:)
Gotcha. Yeah I saw those
->indicators right after sending you that question. I just installedtreelocally -- it is nice! I keep forgetting about that one. I'm gonna take all this as inspiration and come up with a better system. I currently have a server/desktop with my whole entire data archive and a laptop that will have some backup-worthy files, I'd like to be able to easily back them both up locally and to the cloud.I think getting better organized like you did first is the right move. I have a system in place for the desktop machine that works fairly well, but buying this new laptop threw a wrench into that system because I'd like to reuse it in both contexts but it's currently not equipped to do that. I'll figure it out :) But like you said, being organized helps efforts like that (among many others!)
Haha it's in my plans to build a server/nas to have a local "cloud" (and try some self hosted programs)
Aw, I see, good luck with your endeavor!
Thanks. Makes sense. I'll give it a look.