Recently I've been making a concerted effort to collect and organize stuff. Piles of books, magazines and papers are relatively easy, but computer files - not so much.
It doesn't help that computer files and I are like nuts and a squirrel. I've been collecting them for years and stashing them away in what I'm just now realizing are a bazillion different places.
What was I thinking when I saved all this stuff?
So far my organizational scheme has three categories -- Work, Family and Personal. Theoretically everything will have an appropriate "bucket" in the second or third level of one of those categories, but already there are ambiguities. For example, photos.
I'd like to keep all the photos together as a second level category under Family. However, work-related photos probably should go under Work, but what about the bridge pictures I snapped on vacation?
Perhaps this is where the Google-ish philosophy of files with multiple labels rather than the Microsoftian buckets approach would make more sense.
An optimal solution probably lies in combining the two, which is where Picasa seems to be a great tool. Its filtering and search capabilities are terrific, to say nothing of the face recognition feature. But as my recent "clean install" episode pointed out, thinking any such solution is permanent is unwise.
Where, oh where ...?
Beyond the logical organization, there's also the squirrel's ubiquitous dilemma of where to actually stash the stuff.
I thought getting a Pogoplug device and setting up my own little piece of cloud storage might solve the problem. It's turning out to be a neat storage space and I think it's going to be a great solution for backing up our nebulous mass of data, but "the user" still has to figure out what to put where, and how many copies to keep.
Stuff management on a virtual level - how delightful! More insights as they bob to the surface. Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions, I'm open to them.
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