You see companies putting so much emphasis on Search technologies today. This is not just limited to Internet Search and corporate searches. Searching products are putting the same technology on your desktops, workstations, home networks. While this is very useful, but some have gone to the level of saying that with today’s search products, you don’t need to sort anymore. Search is all that you need.

Personally I have realized that Search should be a way of adding to the Sorting feature, not replacing it. If you are like me and have hundreds of gigabytes of data of all types (personal docs, pictures, movies, music, work related stuff) spread over 3 computers, you will find soon enough that if you have not sorted your data properly, it will take you much longer to find what you are looking for using just search.

It’s not that I haven’t given Search its fair chance. I tried a couple of popular Desktop Search Engines over a duration of couple of months to see if that will fit my purpose. Here are my observations.

• More often than I expected, I couldn’t remember the name of the file I was looking for. So I ended up doing multiple searched and then manually going though multiple docs.
• Search works best if there is valid metadata attached to the files.
• If the search is over the network, it will take more time and the support for that is not that good in the Desktop Search products.
• A lot of system resources are used in consistently maintaining the index for the data.

I have found the best solution that works for me is classifying and sorting the data and then if needed I can search through a certain folder to find exactly what I am looking for. Here is a few rules that I follow while organizing my data:

1. Keep all similar data together - For example - keep all music at the same place instead of having it scattered all over your network/Hard Disk Drive/Partitions. They might be on another system, but If they are all together, its easier to keep them organized.
2. Maintain a structure of directories - Start with some basic categories like music, video, documents, software, pictures etc. and then extend underneath them to be more specific like music > english > artist or software > performance tools > Anti-Spyware.
3. Do not have too much depth in directories - I try to keep the depth of the directory structure to a maximum of 4. for example - music > english > artist > metallica. The deeper you have to go to look for a file, the harder it is to organize. For me, it doesn’t matter in case of music as I look for music from my media player and it always easier their to sort based on artist/album etc.
4. Organize your documents by year - I always organize my personal documents (tax docs, purchase receipts, etc) based on year (not by month though). This way it is easier to locate them.
5. Have simple, easy to understand names - Sometimes when you download some files, they have some random characters in them. This is helpful on the server side to identify your file. However, I always change the file name to match the naming conventions that I follow.
6. Always use Metadata - In addition to you music (ID3 tags), have metadata associated with you other files as well. Almost all file types support some kind of metadata association. Having metadata doesn’t help you much in sorting but instead helps in searching through sorted files.

Of course there are other small things that I take care of while organizing. But the above mentioned are the main guidelines I stick by.

Posted by admin in Network, organize, software