I really found difficult to manage my files as my data is increasing day by day . So looking for some suggestions from your guys movies, music, Linux, torrents,Picture files & various other application packages are very poorly organized.

Often I waste my time just for searching for particular file in huge garbage heap. Sometimes I find some movies which I download months back just lying which I haven’t watched, I sure this problem may be with some of you two so share how you manage your data and most important small text files of countless tutorials ,pdf e-books ,documents ,blog entries etc..


I have one stranger requirement; i always change my OS as try newest Linux distros.


Please list how you organize your data
bwt i am looking for a setuo which helps me keep at least 3-4 os at same time installed



i have one 80gb hdd(internal) & one 320gb hdd(external)


one question how to manage to chnage our distro every 6 months, i mean does act bad for HDD??

For a start, if I were trying to swap and change between operating system regularly I'd want to keep my home directory on its own partition which would be shared between the lot. That way personal files and settings are not at risk from the changes.

Other than that organising files is perhaps a case of self organisation and discipline. I download some junk to "misc" directory which I clear out from time to time. If something goes in there it usually means I have no desire to keep them.

I organise photos in their own directory structure and use gqview's metadata capabilities to deal with them (there are lots of programs which will do this job.) Keep music in it's own place and use something like Rhythmbox or Amorak to index it. (There are a number of music library programs out there too.)

Finally, for things like tutorials and posts, useful information I'll want again, I have a "reference" directory which I dump them in. I add a few sub-dirs to group things by topic more or less.

My way:
I'm very used to this method, so, if I have to do a search "by hand" (no beagle, no find command) I find what I'm looking for very quickly.

On my personal computer I use a separate /home partition which enables installing or upgrading distributions without losing personal data..like mentioned above. In my home directory I try to have as little directories as possible (easy to find the "top level" directories for certain stuff); things like "media", "scripts", "workstuff". Under those I have then another set of directories (again, trying to have as little as possible to keep it easy-to-locate); for example, "media" contains "video", "audio" and such. Under those, for example "audio" there are then dirs for different audio materials, and so on..so the thumb rule is to have things well organized, but still trying to have as little directories at one level as possible. Second thing I try is to not have too deep directory structures, as it takes time to click trough them (unless working in command-line, which I luckily do a lot).

I also use external harddisk for keeping things save (it might break up too, but hopefully it and my machine's internal HD won't break up the same time, so I can save things from either one in case of emergency), of course big enough to hold my personal data. Some things I rarely use are held only on external media (DVD, external HD, ...), to conserve space (in the sense of not having unused directories that just make it difficult to find those I do use).

Just make an ext3 partition and store all your data there. Mount it in any Linux in its /etc/fstab. Download "ext2ifs" so that you can use the same partition in MS Windows too. One common data partition for all the OSs. To save space on the Linux use "mv" command to move files you want to store in this master partition as it will remove the old files.

not that strange, just use a spare partition for /home and also put your config in there, do not edit the files in /etc if you can avoid it but have dot-files in your /home, this way you do not have to make the same changes to your config files each time. (eg edit ~/.mpdconf instead of /etc/mpd.conf)

Another thing you may be very interested (and which you can afford since you can back up your whole hard drive to the ext, HDD) is logical volume management (look for lvm2). Then you can create/remove/resize and backup partitions on the fly. I love LVM myself.

I do not fancy the idea of using ext2ifs at all. One of my main reasons for using Linux is security and I do not like the idea of having a Windows installation capable of reading and writing to Linux. I have a FAT32 partition for sharing files between Linux and Windows but as I hardly ever boot into Windows I hardly need it at all.

I am also a little concerned that if home is shared between different Linux installations then there is the possibility of interference between them if settings in the hidden files are different.

My approach is to have data in separate partitions with soft links from home. So I have a big partition for storing all my music files and a soft link to it from home. Similarly there are soft links to a partition holding documents and pictures. I also have an external hard drive for backup using rsync.

As Vrajgh says, it is mostly a quesyion of 'organisation and discipline'.

Thank You guys for your king & useful suggestion
me think what will suit to my needs

also Keep suggesting
what partion size & no of partion should i use??
both on internal & external hdd

It's always good to have /home on a separate partition or disk. Mine is on a 1GB flash drive (backed up frequently). I still have Win2k on a 6GB partition so I have music, movies, pictures on a FAT32 partition that both OSs can read, structured very similar to what Darksidex posted. I don't save a whole lot of music and videos so my FAT32 partition is only 30GB, and I have a symlink from my ~ to where that partition is mounted. Example:

/home/dracolich/Documents -> /mnt/FAT32/Documents

I use a lot of symlinks in my /home to keep it small.