My non-existing Personal Computer File Hygiene

31 Dec, 2020

Situation

There are various PCs.

• Desktop (main workstation)
• Notebook (used when not at the desk like out-of-town)
• Office (usually always on)

Problem

I do not have great file hygiene in place.

• Files I download keep piling up in a single directory.
• Some documents reside on one device, only; not reachable via the other.

Possible Approaches

NAS

A storage device (NAS) is physically available, but I do not want to keep it running all the time due to

• energy considerations
• hardware (disks) preservation (debatable)
• noise of fan and spinning disks

Thus, the NAS storage is not used as main storage -- ERROR #1

SyncThing

The great syncthing service is running on my (disk-encrypted, always-on) office machine.

Two/three folders are getting synced across devices, but since a change of host or whatever unclean swap of device I undertook with upgrading my notebook, folders got out-of-sync, which I realized only now.

Pile of Disks

There are also external disk drives I don't really connect regularily and I do not recall what exactly is stored.

Towards a Solution

Thoughts ...

0. Organize files at the very beginning, when creating them, when downloading them.
1. Use SyncThing more mindful and put at least all non-media files in the main Sync folder. Should I set Documents as main sync?
2. Use the NAS as regular (weekly/monthly) backup drive.
3. Use the external disk(s) as further backup in case of some user-error on the NAS.