Organizing my files (EASILY!!)

[Brendan Kidwell]

Jerry Feldman-2 wrote:
> 
> Basically, my personal solution is to use a hierarchy...
> 

Hah! Hierachy... :^) I tried. What I ended up with over the past 12 years or
so are multiple not-quite-curated copies of various collections: photos,
letters, programming projects, etc... subdivided by year or topic or some
such system. These partial clones are in various stages between fully synced
and abandoned, and you can never tell if any changes in an "abandoned" copy
ever propagated upstream... wherever upstream is. Laptops die or get sold in
a hurry; external hard drives get called into emergency service and their
contents is unceremoniously dumped in ~/limno/brendan's_blue_ext_disk on the
office PC; I'm sure you all know what I mean.

So what I was forced to start, a few months ago, and I haven't gotten a
chance to finish is this:

* Admit that after all the OSes I've used, file transfer protocols,
filesystems, and archiving and dearchiving, file metadata is questionable at
best, especially timestamp.
* Use a hashing algorithm to diff every equal-sized file against every other
(fslint) and produce a report.
* Delete all but the first occurrence of every duplicate file.
* Collate all remaining files from all storage devices onto one and name
them: /from-device-n/original-path/original-filename .
* Pick up the pieces, delete caches, config files, and junk, and move to
/keep/collection-name/topic/filename -- still working on this step. :^)

I promise I'll maintain my hierarchy and play nice with subversion and
unison in the future... but it probably ain't gonna happen and we'll be back
here in 2020.

Maybe there's hope. My almost-plain-text notebooks have been in a single
subversion repository and synced among three hosts for about a year.

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