Should I store files in folders?

As the family genealogist, I have regularly experienced the thrill of coming across a box full of photographs. It’s a surprise venture into the unknown to go through a stack of picture that may or may not have to do with each other. As the quantities of pictures get larger, the thrill starts to wear off as I think to myself that it would be much easier to deal with these pictures if they were in some kind of order. Compare this to coming across carefully organized and planned photo albums that have written comments and descriptions of who’s who. In the paper based world, it makes sense to put photos in albums or papers into labelled file folders. When it comes to the digital world, the same situation doesn’t necessarily apply.

Photo by Fancycrave.com from Pexels
a stack of photos may be fun to look through but can take forever to sort!

The benefits of storing files in folders

I’ve talked before about my method for organizing photos into folders. This gives structure and and easier ability to find photos. Combined with my method for naming and tagging photos, it makes finding that proverbial needle in a haystack a bit easier to find. This can be applied further to any types of folders, for example I keep folders of bills and statements sorted by company types, ie credit card, insurance, hydro, etc. If I want to find my Mastercard bill from 3 years ago, it’s easy enough to go through my folder structure to find the file that I know will be named something like ‘2016-03 Mastercard.pdf’.

I do the same thing with email. Several years ago I moved my email to Gmail. Gmail uses a structure for folders that they call labels. What this means is that you tag emails with a label name but you view them like folders. If you tag an email with more than one label, it will then appear to be in more than one folder. But if you delete it from a folder/label, it’s gone as there is really only one copy.

Photo by Mike from Pexels
those paper file folders did make finding information a bit easier

In the early days of computing, it made sense to apply structures from the real world into the computer world. Folders in your filing cabinet became folders in your computer. Photo albums also can easily be structured into a computer in the form of folders. I was talking this week with an older friend who agreed with me that this structure makes a lot of sense to him, but his son doesn’t necessarily agree.

An argument for one big free-for-all folder

Part of the power of computers is that they can do the hard work of sorting and searching. Imagine picking up a big box of photos and being able to find the one you want in seconds. That’s what computers have done for the digital world. Let’s look at how this might work in a few examples where we eliminate the use of folders.

Email with no folders

Anyone who has used Google knows at what speed search results are returned. Gmail and many other online email systems use this same concept to allow you to search your personal, private email. Although I choose to label all of my emails (into folders), I could leave them all in the inbox. When I want to find a message, I can just search for any words in it and/or the sender and the results will be returned as in a Google search.

Digital photos all in one big virtual box

Let’s say I put all of my thousands of digital photos into one folder. I could still search for them by date as every digital photo taken has the time and date embedded in the file. This isn’t the case for scanned photos but there is software that will allow you to set this information. Google Photos and other similar photo sharing services don’t use folders. You just upload all your pictures and Google lets you search and organize them into albums.

Files in one big folder

Going back to the example of the Mastercard statement. If I name my files in meaningful ways then I can search for them easily. Let’s say I had a folder with these files in it:

  • 2016-03_Mastercard_statement.pdf
  • 2014-03_hydro_statement.pdf
  • 204-02_letter_to_joe.doc

Searching the folders for any words that I know will appear in the name or maybe even in the content of the document will find the file. This would mean I could keep many unrelated documents in the same folder but still be able to find them.

So which way is better, folders or not?

It really depends on your way of thinking. On one hand, the folder structure is based on the physical world of folders and albums. If you are able to find what you want with searching then having less structure could make sense. Personally, I prefer more folders that allow me to browse when I want, but since all my files are searchable within the computer I can still do both. If I’m searching for copy of a specific statement from 5 years ago, I know exactly which folder to look in. If I want to find a letter that I wrote to a friend at some unknown time, I can search their name in my folders to find it.

Without some level of organization, certain data will drop into a virtual ‘black hole’ never to be found. Think about it this way. If you had 10,000 photos and put them all, unlabeled into a single folder, imaging how hard it would be to pinpoint a specific one. By putting some organization into your files structures, you make it easier to find what you are looking for.

What is your digital organization system?

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Winter away and can access all my files by moving to the cloud

Bonnie spends much of the winter in Florida. For a number of years, she has kept her computer at home powered on and she used remote control software to access her computer remotely. Years ago this was a good solution when there wasn’t an easy way to access your data outside of your computer. A lot has changed since then so I helped her figure out a way to leave her computer off while away yet still have access to all her important data. In order to move to the cloud, there’s some analysis to do.

What data do you need to access

The first question when it comes to moving your data to the cloud is what do you need to access? In Bonnie’s case, it was all her documents, such as Word, Excel, and PDF files plus email. Let’s go through how we made this work.

Files and documents

Bonnie’s computer runs Windows 10. Her files are are stored in “My Documents” which makes it easy to find and eventually relocate them. She has a free account from Microsoft which gives her 5 GB of space in Microsoft OneDrive. This means that all files moved to the OneDrive folder will be automatically synced to her OneDrive account. Then, when OneDrive is installed on her Florida computer, all these files will automatically get download to that computer. Any files changed while in Florida will then get synced up and back to her home computer. We moved all files to OneDrive and they appeared online in just a few minutes. As time goes on, she may need more space and can pay for additional storage on OneDrive when required.

Email

Bonnie uses Microsoft Outlook for mail and all of it gets downloaded to her computer. While this is very convenient for day to day communications, it’s not so good for being able to access her folders remotely. Bonnie has an email address with her local internet provider and did not want to move yet to a new address. She does have a Gmail account so we set it up such that Gmail folders appear in Outlook. We then moved all folders from Outlook into Gmail, using Outlook. It took awhile, but now Bonnie will file all messages in Gmail and can use Outlook to do it. As long as Outlook is set up on both home and Florida computers, she can see the same Gmail folders.

Additional Benefits

With her mail and files moved to the cloud, in this case OneDrive and Gmail, Bonnie no longer has to rely on using one computer and making sure that it’s turned on and available all the time. If she puts the OneDrive app on her phone and connects her phone to Gmail, then she can access her files from any device including mobile ones. The next step would be to identify other files such as photos and get them available online too. A proper backup scheme is still required as just having files on the cloud isn’t enough.

Do you have a reliance on one computer? What files do you need to move to the cloud?Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail