“My Mac’s file structure remains pretty much the same today as it did 10 or 15 years ago. I keep nearly everything—files, folders, documents, and stuff—in two places. My Documents folder, and my Desktop,” Ron McElfresh writes for Mac 360.
McElfresh asks, “With hard drive space so cheap these days has file organizing become a lost art?”
“Organizing and storage management are not things of the past, though Mac users take different paths to each,” McElfresh writes.
McElfresh covers two Mac apps: “WhatSize?” and “Tidy Up!” – $13 and $30 respectively – and concludes by asking, “Other than OCD, what’s the purpose of such a utility that may not compete well against the free effort of simple organization of the Documents folder and a prudent use of Spotlight?”
Full article here.
is it snappy that way? furrst poast=)
I have CDO, it’s like OCD, but the letters are in the right order, like they SHOULD be!
Tidy Up is super cool – when you have 100’s upon 100’s of gigabytes representing hundreds of thousands of photos, files, etc., it is an amazingly useful and powerful utility – it does in hours what would take DAYS.
Any utility that saves that much time is irreplaceable…
Heck, even if your time is only worth $5 an hour, you save $$.
McElfresh asks, “With hard drive space so cheap these days has file organizing become a lost art?”
This statement makes no sense. Cheap storage means that people can afford to accumulate massive amounts of data, but how in the world do you find all that stuff without good organization? Spotlight, while very useful, is not nearly reliable enough to rely on exclusively. My data is useless to me if I can’t find it when I need it. For me, meticulous organization is as important as the data itself.
Windows and it’s poorly organizable file structure has made the vast majority of users lazy and unorganized. As users migrate and change the OS they use, this becomes very clear and easy to spot. Most OEM’d PCs have main C: drive partitioned so Windows and the rest of the bloatware take up 70 to 95% of the free space (OEM what as little free space as possible as the duplicators take as long to dupe free space as they do to dupe real date) then the remainder of the drive is left unformatted or is quick formatted and a drive D: partition is created. OEM’s do this so the number of master reference disks used with their disk duplicators can be kept to a minimum and disk duplication time is kept to a minimal standard time frame. Example ordering Identical Dell systems, one with a 250GB drive and the other with a 500GB or 1TB drive will yield identical C: partitions with 80% of the partition take up with Windows and other Bloatware.
Users quickly fill the C: partition and start dumping and installing the new software to the D: partition with no idea or sense of File and volume management. If the OEMs would get their collective heads out of their asses they’d bite the bullet and have master images of each system model and each drive size so the C: drives were the full disk partition and stop the game of 1 partition fits all drives.
I’ve helped many friends with their Windows issues over the years and you’d be amazed how many of them didn’t know that their Hard drives were not full. They’d just filled up the C: partition which was a fraction of the overall disk space and the rest of the disk was empty and in a lot of cases unformatted and still in the divers raw state. A quick format creating a new disk partition or with a little extra effort (on my part) and some luck expanding the C: partition to use the full disk did them wonders.
For even many long time Window’s users managing and using multiply disks is big mystery that creates panic and fear of loosing their files. Even long time Linux users often do not know how to manage files and directories across multiply disks effectively. KDE in GNOME are moving forward much more quickly in that area Microsoft is, with helping users to effectively manage their file and directory structures.
GrandPerspective is another great app, and it is open source. http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
Personally I store almost nothing in ~/Desktop or ~/Documents. I prefer to keep my working data on a separate drive or partition; I seem to have less problems with file corruption that way.
By sheer coincidence, just yesterday I had everything on my desktop mysteriously vanish. It was not to be found in the trash, nor did Spotlight locate any of it. Fortunately I had a Time Machine backup from the previous day, which I used to restore it. I still have no idea what happened, since I had not installed anything new. This is OS X 10.5.
WheresTheFreeSpace does the job of WhatSize?, but with no restrictions on the Trial version.
@ Military Police
You must be doing something highly unusual or have bad hardware some where. I have been using Mac OS X since the beginning (and OS 9 before that) and I have never had files disappear off the desktop on me.
Peace
-Brian
I wrote a little script to take anything that is placed on my Desktop and put it into a dated folder in “~:Documents:Work Area” so that my Desktop is always clear. It’s really helped to keep me organized.
@emmayche
Would you mind sharing?
spotlight has ruined me. i’m so lazy now hehe.
Clean download folder from old and unsused files should free up enough space on Mac.