Guest post by Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don’t see their hard drives the same way.
As anyone who has had to sift through a relative’s landfill organization technique can attest, most people shouldn’t be in charge of organizing their files. The machine should sort files based on metadata about the file, and people can select options and provide search criteria to filter the data. We’re power users here, but even I rely on fd, locate, and ripgrep quite often.
I guess this most surprising part is this is surprising. Computing is application focused. People open MS Office Word, Apple Pages, or LibreOffice Writer; they don’t open a file. Operating systems don’t have pluggable extensions which let people manipulate various file types; they have applications which run on them.
On top of that, files and folders are a meta-construct so humans can grok filesystem semantics and, ultimately, blocks on a storage device.
Filing systems or data organisation is a big topic in itself. Back in the day when systems used to be paper based this really was a thing and some experts made a lot of money reorganising corporate systems. Whether it is paper based or via computers it’s all just a way of arranging things so someone can mentally imagine where they are in the mess and find what they want to find whether directly or by providing cues and minimising the number of steps to finding it.
I maintain an updated index for some data broken down by categories. I tend to organise my data into “buckets”and then break it down. Some data will fit neatly into the file system structure. For more detailed things especially data gathered from multiple sources around a topic where the data is messy it can fit into more than one category which gets difficult. Some freeform data which most of it is can be very difficult to keyword search as meaning versus the words or phraseology can be very different. Some data is in video format which adds another layer of difficulty. Other data obtained for legal reasons can be entire websites which have been downloaded. Data at any level may have to be summarisd or interpreted which is yet more data which needs to be organised and indexed.
Most people are probably not aware that in many court cases a body of evidence presented in court is not read through from end to end by the judge. For some cases they simply glance through the index and examine the titles maybe skimming one or two on the way. Another thing people will miss is that people can rely on the weight given to them as an authority and that the index of evidence presented may be presented in a favourable way. This can have a skewing effect on both the reaction of legal representation and the final judgment. And this is precisely why large and usually well funded lawyers acting on behalf of the state or a large organisation take care this is the view that the court is presented with. Of course, it all falls apart if you know their data better than they do and start pointing out to the judge the things they don’t want the judge to know.
Years ago a senior manager once came to me and said there had been a particular job which needed doing. They said it couldn’t be done but said to their boss they would take on the challenge. Having just indexed 20,000+ documents they came to ask me if I knew where a certain document for a certain year was. I had them arranged in my own head and after sifting through the index in my own head told them I could find that document. The look on their face was one of disbelief and they scoffed. I was a bit unsure but knew it was in one of two places so led them to the document room which at the time was the size of three times the size of the office spaces so its area was roughly the size of a small house. Five minutes later I pulled out the document they had been looking for. They had volunteered for the none trivial task of computerising and providing a system to analyse this data on the basis they believed it wouldn’t be found so they now had a large job on their hands. I never did get thanked for this.
“Most people shouldn’t be allowed to touch their filesystems.”
Quite a radical view, I am having a hard time which branch of neo-fascism should we categorize it under?
The “out of touch nerd hyperbole” branch?
Computing has been commoditized for a looong time by now. Most people use computers as another appliance. As such they need to be shielded from the underlying specifics of what makes the sausage tick.
Yeah, and whenever low-issues issues arise after the warranty period has expired, users are obliged to buy new devices. What a wonderful PoV!
Let them be slaves to corporations and pay, pay and pay.
I don’t understand, are you trying to prove the point regarding the “out of touch nerd hyperbole?”
You sound like Bill Gates’ clone.
That’s a load of horse pucky. A computer is NOT an appliance. “Shielding” users from the underlying specifics of how they work leads to walled-gardens.
No thanks!
The proper course of action is to TEACH people the basics. An educated user-base is less easy to control.
LMAO, and seconded.
Should we also not allow users to manage their devices? I.e. remove root/Administrator options altogether? Apple and Google are salivating at the prospect.
Big Whoop, I’m afraid. Most computer programmers these days don’t know about how the software they work on actually interact with the hardware, so files and folders? Why should people who only work with apps know anything about files and folders?
I am somewhat of a luddite in terms of files and folders and dont want the system to keep track of them at all, more than keeping the file allocation and location permanent until moved/removed. I do not care for any meta-data and much of th3 meta data can be malicious if used in the wrong way, so i prefer a system without such features.
I disagree with pretty much everything Mr. Flatland_Spider has said, and unfortunately he’s never made it look like an opinion while it’s nothing but an opinion.
Searching will often fail because you just don’t know what to look for or when the information you’re looking for was stored which means you can lose something irrevocably under the pressure of thousands of files.
“Searching will often fail because you just don’t know what to look for”
In my experience searching fails because the tools are garbage.
Search in Windows doesn’t work.
Search in Outlook doesn’t work.
Search in Thunderbird doesn’t work.
Search on the internet is a joke at best.
Doesn’t that just simply prove Artem point, that file search is useless? I mean, you’re literally saying search will fail because it’s broken. Right?
Personally, I like arranging my stuff in a hierarchy like structure, similar too how does and folders work. Could be because that’s how I learned how to do it to beginner with. I also have trouble arranging my bookmarks on any fashion other than in a hierarchical structure. I tried using the “tag” system, but that quickly became a mess.
No, Artem’s point is that it’s the fault of the user.
In my experience it’s the fault of the tools.
I even ran into this yesterday.
I had an email conversation about Home Server 2011.
“Windows Home Server 2011” is in every mails title.
I search for 2011 in Thunderbird and get 0 results…
There is no excuse for this.
It’s pure incompetence on the developers side.
Basically… almost every modern OS gets wrong, what BeOS got right at 66Mhz… and 32MB of ram…
Sad to see how they have gunked up Haiku with mediocre package management ideas but… even so it is still there as a modern implementation of those ideas and it works. I believe there is also an automatic file organizer “file chute” or something like that written in basic you can install to optionally auto sort your folders.
I agree. Searching suck. I did not found any good searching engine, neither on desktop, neither on the Internet. I feel that it is even worse than it used to be – but maybe it`s because my memory is trying to forget bad things
When I was in my teens, a friend who had internet at the time introduced me to google Desktop (Discontinued 2011).
Since then I’m dreaming about a system that would provide content-based search along with tagging. Tags replacing folders in a sense. And me pretty much not caring about the folder hierarchy. Such a system could also be built on top folders and symlinks.
The closest that ever came to being usable was the KDE Nepomuk project. It fell flat on its face due to enormous resource requirements.
Windows search has had in win7 a plugin system that could index file contents. AFAIK no vendor except microsoft (and maybe adobe) provided such plugins. Haven’t used MS products since win7, so can’t say more.
One of the most useful things I know of is Kodi and its indexing system. Very limited and specific usecase, but if expanded to a system such as was Nepomuk, I think it could work magic.
Mobile OSes today seem to require a per-app integrated file browser, or gallery-like indexing system, otherwise no access to underlying files.
People should be encouraged to dig deep, but not necessarily required to do so.
I started programming with BASIC. It was adequate to solve my problems, and I never had to worry about memory organization, or what “big-Oh” notation meant. There was plenty of time to learn more.
Same with computer structures. Initially a literal floppy disc was where I had my data.
Today, a new computer user might have all their photos in Adobe’s Cloud. They would have no idea how a JPEG works, but could organize tens of thousands photos, and access them from their laptop, tablet, and don’t worry about backups or bit-rots for long term archiving.
If they have time, they would set up a NAS and remote backups themselves. Maybe it is better than trusting a large corporation with your data. Maybe it is not worth the hassle to save $120 per year.
It is a tradeoff between getting a ransomware on your local data, vs having Adobe lock out your account. To be frank, I don’t know which one is more likely.
SInce the advent of apps your data is basically a hostage used by vendors to trap you. Apple pioneered this and Google industrialized it with Microsoft copying later as usual, and doing a better job potentially. I recently switched from Apple Photos to folders I can access. Still wondering if I did the right thing. The Mac box is gone so I have to move on. Might upload everything to Google Photos. Out of the frying pan into the fire.
> The machine should sort files based on metadata about the file
*Knock knock*
BeOS calling….
Data just comes from sources and flows to destinations. The sources can be files or devices, and the destinations can be files or devices.
Abstracting away files and folders (like iOS tries to do) is all fun and games until you need to exchange data between systems (without the use of clunky apps like iTunes).
Of course, Apple wants all your files to be “owned” by apps: their apps. That way, moving out becomes much harder. Especially when you don’t know what is a file and what is a DRM’ed download stored somewhere as a binary blob.
I am not an obsessive organiser myself, but I do have things organised in coarse subdirectories inside the default “Pictures”, “Videos”, “Music”, “Documents” folders (most of them 1-level deep, rarely 2). Once you have lots of files, it’s the only way to maintain sanity.
IMO a good compromise would be to have the usual “Pictures”, “Videos”, “Music”, “Documents” folders and have subdirectories be 1-level deep by default. Rarely do people organize things more than 1 level deep in real life. Give 2-level directories as an option,
Oh, and my personal pet peeve: Have the browser sort out downloaded files into the default directories per type instead of dumping everything into “Downloads”. The “Downloads” folder should be for misc files, I am sick and tired of manually moving pictures and videos from “Downloads”.
Why move files from Downloads? Just set the browser to ask you where to download each file, that way, you organize while you work, and you always know where things are.
This works of you are an obsessive organiser, most people want a “coarse” organisation to make searching easier.
I am definitely not an “Obsessive organizer”, downloading files is something that i do when i want quick access to a file, not knowing where it is impedes that.
Make searching easier? How could it be easier than selecting the parent folder of your presorted files vs sorting through an huge list of files that takes too long to load anyway…
I don’t feel that kids need to be educated in how to turn up a laptop in browser mode and to connect to TikTok or some other web based application like spreadsheet. As this is too much biased and narrow teaching towards some services of some company. And when the same kids will grow up this services will likely be obsolete already. Replaced by something else. Saying kids don’t need to understand on how computers in general work and should be kept ignorant and abstracted. That is just stupid.
“Computing is application focused.”
I don’t agree, I think most computing is data based, with the exception of the pure content consumer use case – which is not a small fraction of course, but just a part of the whole. W.r.t. “the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure”, I see this as a very big fault propagated forcefully by one mobile device and OS company. But yes, it’s very much a generational issue, in part because 3x-4x age people can very well remember times when search functionality was laughable.
However, file systems, hierarchies and their benefits (yes, they have benefits) should still be taught since it’s a very very bad situation when someone reaches postgrad studies and doesn’t have the slightest clue how to handle tens or hundreds of thousands of files generated in a large number of scientific fields during data processing.
I find it absolutely unacceptable that an IT or CS major can come out of studies without proper file system knowledge. Yet, this is not something rare these days. I found that very sad, mostly because it shows a colossal degradation of teaching&learning requirements and expectations. Simply put, in a lot of ways knowledge is becoming much more narrow, superficial and tool-based. I don’t think this is the proper way to go.
@l3v1
We pick up a lot as we grow up from the norms and standards of the time and bring this with us into education. As fore and more are exposed to the experience that corporates want to sell there is an erosiion of institutional memory. The kids are simply 10-20 years too young to have known different or have the time or energy to devote to reading up on all the work which went before. Ditto 99% of customers (who have been relgated to “consumer”) are not technical people familiar with any of this so they are in the same boat. There has also been an erosion by corporates and governments of the ecosystem where experts and expert communities had a strong role in forming policy. Not only media but social media drowned this out and all the old forums and usenet groups and blogs are all long gone.
It’s been trend long in the making. Once upon a time people were taught skills .Those skills could then be used with any application. Then Microsoft and others began pushing application skills. So instead of being taught word processing you were taught Microsoft Word. Training companies and publishers got behind this and formed a monoculture. Between this and where we are today are deliberate steps mostly by monopoly corporations where the big corporation favoured application is the gateway. Yes, a lot of small developers also follow this pattern. Yes, they should know better and yes they should object but the corporations and media who depend on these corporations for advertising revenue have created a situation of “learned helplessness”.
I don’t see that too much as an issue. People will be taught how to use the applications of the day. I, myself, was taught on Microsoft Word (pre-ribbon), but it gave me a good standing in how to actually use applications and utilise a computer.
I work in a secondary school, and the current curriculum is shocking. There’s absolutely no focus on how to actually use a computer, with much of the focus being on computer science, programming, and theory. This has lead to a great many pupils that have a very limited, if any, grasp on how to actually use the computers we have. As someone on the IT team, it’s reassuring that i’ll have little competition over my job, but at the same time, it’s really depressing that all these students are leaving with great experience on how to program Python, but very little knowledge on what a file structure is, or how to use a WIMP GUI.
@The123Kig
Perhaps I have more professional expertise and training and experience than you to see this. Other professionals on the same level who entered the industry around the same time agree with me. I know because I have had those discussions. You teach the building block skills first and the application second as well as having a plurality of applications in the IT space. This way they develop adaptability and are able to bring skills to the problem. It’s the same core approach with languages and other applications like databases. The focus needs to be on what problem is needed to be solved. It gives them the confidence to challenge management monocultures and nod along decision making and time and money being wasted on products they don’t need. That is what I was taught as I was lucky enough to have senior lecturers and lecturers who had real world experience or who did consultancy work on the side at a time when only 5-30% of the population had even seen a computer. Back then you had data processing and computer science and computer studies not “IT”.
It sounds like whoever is responsible for your curriculum (whether IT, academics, politicians, teachers or wheover has had input) needs a kick up the rear.
I wouldn’t bother with fighting office politics because you will either end up doing all the work or have to find another job. Smooch your local politician with your concerns.
I’m afraid it’s a product of our lovely Tory government and the exam boards who implement these recommendations. The problem is a lack of focus on “IT”, ie the skills and knowledge required to use the computing devices, applications and technologies, with more of a focus on the STEM side, with much of the teaching focussing on programming and theory. When i was a t school, there was a great focus on touch-typing, spreadsheet use, word processing, and many other basic skills required to use a computer. Nowadays there is very little focus on this. From my understanding, the secondary schools rely on the primaries to teach these skills, and the primaries have little to no budget for IT systems, relying on tablets and a small amount of computer systems to teach kids who would rather be eating glue sticks than learning how to edit a word document.
What a shockingly condescending reply.
@123king
That is fair comment. I was brought up in a time when this wasn’t so much of an issue.
Today teaching time and money budget has been squeezed at all levels so the opportunity to develop a rounded skillset as children develop has been eroded. If you don’t have sharp elbowed “get ahead” wealthy parents exposing you to business skills and social opportunities and who lack the finance to pay for tools and materials and other opportunities you’re stuffed. The current government cruelly and spitefully and unecessarily doing away with participation in the Erasmus scheme is simply one such example.
@power9
Be quiet.
I completely disagree. If you use your computer for games or dumb stuff perhaps it doesn’t matter but if you use it for serious professional work you don’t want to mix the files from different projects/clients/expedients/contracts.
I completely disagree. The concept of files and folders comes from organizing physical objects, including papers and any other items. Knowing how to organize physical objects is an essential life skill, as everyone has a home and stuff they acquire through life. Organizing the stuff of digital life is no different and also an essential life skill.
I disagree, spending a lot of time organising something that you don’t know if/when you need again is a waste of time and effort both digitally and physically.
The file system as we know it still has its uses, but it very limited in that you only really have one entry point which is a random constraint from the old days and mimicking filing cabinets where you place physical objects, and it is really easy to mess up if you are not careful, and it is not versioned.
I only know the file structure of all my ripped media because Plex has naming standards that i needed to follow, but all my media is consumed through Plex, so i could not really care less how it is physically stored – as long as it is on the mirrored and backed up volume. I loved the original music only iTunes especially because it meant you no longer had to worry about file structure but instead got a database like view of your music.
Important documents i obviously do store so i know i have them, either by emailing them to myself (so i have gmail search to find them when needed) or putting them in dropbox, but i don’t obsess over the folder structure. (think of it as building piles)
When we are talking code, i again know how it is stored because that is how most tools work, though i don’t really care about the physical structure, what matters is the logical structure and that you can search/navigate it efficiently inside whatever tool you are using.
I don’t lose stuff, but obviously it sometimes takes a while to find something specific, but i still believe i save a ton of time compared to trying to optimize everything.
From a purely time perspective, organizing once saves n times more time than never organizing and having to search for material n times in the future. it’s a question about when do you want to waste your time, when you originally save it and the information contained in the file is fresh in your mind or some time in the future when you are searching for the file.
What workflow are you using where there is only one entry point to your files? As has been covered multiple times in the past on OSAlert, a file system is nothing more than a database of files. I-nodes are randomly placed in your hard drive and a virtual table displays the information to you in a hierarchical fashion. How you choose to interact with that hierarchy is completely up to you.
I completely disagree with your point that the file system mimics filing cabinets. Additionally, a hierarchical structure is just plainly intuitive. Want to find a picture of your son’s first birthday party? All you have to do is browse to Pictures/2019/Johnny’s Birthday. Are you honestly saying that initially setting up a hierarchy like that would take more time than trying to find an image with filename “IMG_0191.JPG” in a non-hierarchical file system? Or are you saying you would add metadata to that picture in order to make it easier to find in the future. Lets say that metadata included year and the tag “Johnny’s Birthday”. It’s almost like the hierarchy was created naturally.
Media consumption is not a valid example of why files and folders should or should not be used, but even then the hierarchy makes sense… The song you are listening to came from Artist A/Album X. You need at least the artist name in order to find a song, so placing them in a hierarchy where the artist is at the upper level makes absolute sense.
Every once in a while, some of us need to put our big-boy pants and actually get some work done in the real world. For example, like the author of the article, I’m a college professor. I organize my class files by class, then by type of content. When I’m working on a particular class, I browse to that folder and then can easily find all my quizzes sitting under the folder “Quizzes”, my lecture notes under “Lecture Notes”, or my reference material under “Reference”. When I created the files, I knew exactly where they belonged, so it wasn’t any extra work creating the hierarchical structure.
Your solution seems to be dumping every file in a generic “Classes” folder and then searching for the file when you need it. What happens when you have a few dozen files for each class and you’re teaching 5 different courses in a single semester? Sounds exhausting! I can see why so many kids these days suffer from anxiety.
The what!? You do realize there is no “physical” structure, right? By definition, a file system is a virtual and logical structure.
I must wonder, do you take the same approach to physical objects? Do you have a sock drawer or do you simply put your socks in the closest part of the house when you fold laundry? In my mind, the hierarchy there is obvious: Bedroom/Dresser/Sock Drawer. I guess what you’re saying is that leaving your clothes in the dryer until you need them is perfectly fine, you can just go in there and try to a pair of matching socks, after all. That would save tons of time, according to you.
Feels a whole lot like losing stuff than spending time searching for it. You might believe you save a ton of time, but it really sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself that’s the case.
All that being said, it is probably true that you would spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to organize your files now. Once they’re a mess, having to go through each file to figure out where they belong would just be a nightmare. But don’t kid yourself, had they been organized from the beginning, you would spend a fraction of the time finding them, now. Additionally, your files do not need to be “optimally organize”, like you suggest. That’s just a strawman argument.
Personally, I like knowing exactly where all my stuff is (including my files) and spend as little time looking for it possible. It reduces stress and creates a calmer environment. That statement is especially true when I’m in a hurry.
teco.sb,
It really doesn’t take much complexity in life to warrant practicing high level organizational skills.
Someone who doesn’t know how will be at a loss, but in fairness our modern mobile platforms have done a terrible job of giving us adequate organizational tools, making the effort unrewarding. Arguably that’s on our industry for failing to provide tools than on users for failing to embrace them.
That’s not really true though. If you’re working on a project for school or work that’s going to take both time and effort to do, the couple of seconds needed to create a folder for it is many orders of magnitudes less than the time and effort going into the project. It hardly makes any sense at all to NOT organize things better.
It just doesn’t make sense not to unless all of your work are one-off documents or you only work on one thing at a time before permanently moving to the next. But for anything of greater complexity, the time you save by not creating a folder is overshadowed by the chaos you’ve created. This is true both in physical life as well as on the computer.
But that’s just the point, there are things for which it’s not important, and/or search is sufficient. For example as a consumer, it’s enough for me to be able to search music titles & movies, but if I were editing those same movies myself, it would be absolutely critical to keep all the movie clips / scripts / artwork / etc organized so I wouldn’t have to sort through all the content I had ever worked on every time I needed to find something. Same deal with tax/legal documents or what have you. The time savings of not creating a folder do not even remotely justify the resulting chaos. If you don’t have complex needs (and I would say a music collection is pretty basic), then perhaps there’s not much benefit, but many real world things genuinely are complex and you’d be at a major loss for not knowing how to arrange it.
Note: Dealing with folders is terrible on mobile platforms. However we need to be clear it’s not the folder concept that’s difficult, it’s just the bad implementations, standards, and tools that make it difficult. I’ve repeatedly banged my head over Android’s lack of ability to organize things particularly with photos, this is so frustrating! The ubiquitous use of mobile platforms lacking proper capabilities is likely to blame for why so many are lacking in their organizational skill sets. It’s really not their fault, they just never got exposed to more sophisticated concepts.
@Alfman
Once you click portability is the same thing the rest follows naturally. When you put the effort into creating a thin portability layer you only need to do it once.
Most so-called portability toolkits out there are far too fat and duplicate each other and none of them does the complete job. Few if any cover compiler or SDK quirks or wrap fundamental standard calls in a portable way.
I no longer develop software so it’s not my problem!
It really is an essential skill. As an ADHD kid of very disorganized parents I avoided organization for the longest time. I constantly lost important documents that caused me major issues, missed important dates, lost personal items in my living space like my phone/wallet/keys/remotes. I learned to organization working in IT. Having to quickly figure out how companies organized their client files for instance. Yes many companies use line of business apps for this, but even these function on top of files and folders. Even content management systems which exist to remove users from files and folders and use metadata still work on files and folders when you have to administer them.
My quality of life in my personal life is vastly improved by applying similar organization to my life even though my mind and personality don’t lean that way naturally. I never lose my wallet and keys because there is a designated place for them. I don’t lose important documents as they are organized. I always know where to find my important information like work history and education dates and references, etc. Although my nature dislikes the idea of it, I even keep calendars for my appointments, home and car maintenance etc. and it makes life so much easier.
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It really depends on your use case, but one thing that is often missed is that for the average person, the scale of the problem is not that large. You’re just not working with that many files that it actually becomes a problem. It can be inconvenient, but is it really a problem?
Now, as you go into more specific fields where organization matters more, then you will start to see more standard organization. If you work in a field where you have cases, probably all the assets for that case will be in a folder for that case. If you’re a professional photographer, all the photos will be in a folder for an event.
For students though. I was your typical organizer who had a folder for each subject where all my work for that subject would go in that folder. Is that really needed? You’re not working on thousands of assignments at a time. As long as you know the ‘current’ assignments you’re working on, you can get by. As long as you know some keywords you can search for, you can find it.
In a way, you can even think of folder organization as simply meta data. Me placing all work for a course in it’s own folder is like placing a tag on each file marking it as belong to that course. Meta-data search sounds awesome, but getting the meta data in there is always an issue. You can a picture, you have to get some tags in there. Maybe some of it can be done automatically, but most of the time it’s not.
I’m glad people have explained the need for organising skills and the problems with the OS and applications getting in the way of this. People may be surprised how quickly things get on top of them if they don’t organise and the need comes along one day. It’s not something to obsess about but if you have more than a handful of things on your plate it probably is a good idea to think about organising before it becomes a mountain.
One of the biggest open secrets of the ultra wealthy is storage. Things like cupboards or single use rooms or ornamental boxes. It keeps things out of the way instead of piling up. It keeps them clean. It helps facilitate fast maintenance. It allows you to focus on space and design and the social event of the moment. Their places don’t look good by accident.
Inside my storage cupboards everything is organised by shelf or by box. Every box is labelled. If I want to find something I can find it in seconds. Nothing will get lost or broken or dirty. My desk is computer, lamp, phone. All cables are routed to a box fixed out of sight at the back of the desk, and charging cables discretely secured with a clip. “Junk” goes in a carved wooden box with a lid.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/2/22758519/dropbox-automated-folder-organization-file-rename
Ugh. Please don’t.