One of my resolutions this year was to “go digital.” From my 2009 Resolution list:<\/p>\n

“I’ve been working on this one for a while now, and I expect to be done shortly. The two big focus areas of this one are: getting rid of all VHS tapes and getting rid of all cassette tapes. I am winning both of those battles and hope to have the house clean of both items shortly. That leaves music CDs, which are also slowly being ripped and copied up to the server. LPs are not really a problem at this point; I have a few, but they are more for artwork than listening now. I do have a few that need converting over but that is way down near the bottom of the list.”<\/i><\/p>\n

I’ve been working on this for a while now, and I know some of my friends like Herby<\/a> and Earl<\/a> have been too. If you’ve started moving all of your music, files and photos on to the computer, here’s something you may not have thought about: How on earth are you going to be able to find anything?<\/i> Moving everything on to your PC isn’t going to help you if you can’t retrieve it!<\/p>\n

Best I can tell, there are two solutions. <\/p>\n

The first way involves organizing everything on your computer so that you can easily find your data without the use of an index. This involves doing a bit of thinking before you get started. For example, I am almost halfway done moving all my MP3 files to a network drive. Currently, the folder contains 255 GB of music; that’s 3,908 folders and 63,187 files. If my music wasn’t organized, can you imagine how long it would take me to find Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby? (Too long, too long!) The way my music is organized is, I have a single folder (mp3) and then folders underneath that one (mp3 – Videogame Music, mp3 – Christmas, mp3 – Audio Books, etc.) Then, of course, there’s a huge directory called “mp3 – music” which contains the majority of my files. Underneath that folder are five additional folders – A-E, F-J, and so on. It’s not the greatest system in the world, but as a test just now I was able to click on “mp3 – music”, “U-Z”, “Vanilla Ice – To the Extreme,” and listen to “Vanilla Ice – Ice, Ice Baby.mp3” all within a matter of seconds. Lucky me.<\/p>\n

The problem with this method is that it does not lend itself to looking at organizing your data in multiple ways. For example, if I want to find an album that starts with the letter “V”, this works great. If I want to find “all classic rock albums I own,” it doesn’t work at all. <\/p>\n

Another problem with organizing your data in this way is either organizing your data too much, or not enough. I have gigs and gigs of eBooks. Those things are hard to organize. “Technology” is too big of a folder; under that one, I added “Computer Related.” That too ended up being gigantic. Eventually I ended up with a squirrel’s nest of folders (ie: “TechnologyComputer RelatedOperating SystemsWindows 2008”). The trick is to find a level and style of organization that makes sense to you personally; after all, it’ll be you who’s trying to find things at a later date!<\/p>\n

At a minimum you’ll want to become friends with the Windows search utility; Google’s Desktop Search is better and faster.<\/p>\n

The second solution involves creating an index — or, in laymen’s terms, “maintaining a list.”<\/p>\n

Lists are most useful for data that is not stored directly on your computer, but rather on removable media (CDs, DVDs, removable hard drives, or, God forbid, floppy disks.) When you store files you will put them on media. The media will get put somewhere. The goal of a list is to track what file is on what media, and ultimately, where that media is stored.<\/p>\n

Lists can be made using a variety of programs. The simplest form of list is a simple text file. This is probably the simplest to create but the most difficult to sort. Without additional utilities and\/or trickery, it’s pretty hard to “query” a text file. One big step up from a plain text file is a spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel. Once your data is stored in a spreadsheet, you can do all kinds of things with it — for example, you can alphabetize it with the click of a button. You can also sort your list based on multiple criteria (sort your music by genre first, and then alphabetize it). If you want to build more advanced queries, you’ll want to move toward a database program like Microsoft Access. Once your data has been migrated into a database you can do all kinds of queries, the only limit at that point being the amount of information you have in your database. With enough stored information you can easily find out which albums you’ve bought in the past 90 days, which movies star Harrison Ford, or a list of all your “fighting games.” If you want to take things one step further, you can put all your data into a SQL or MySQL database. That’s where my data is now. With these web friendly back ends, you can easily build web-based front ends that will allow you to query your list no matter where you are, physically. <\/p>\n

Right now even though I’m using both methods, occasionally I’ll think of something that I’m not able to find. At that point it becomes a mental game with myself as I try and second guess “where I would have put something.” My eventual goal is to get things so organized that anyone walking in would be able to find anything I’ve filed. I’ve got a long way to go to reach that point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my resolutions this year was to “go digital.” From my 2009 Resolution list: “I’ve been working on this one for a while now, and I expect to be done shortly. The two big focus areas of this one are: getting rid of all VHS tapes and getting rid of all cassette tapes. I am winning both of those battles and hope to have the house clean of both items shortly. That leaves music CDs, which are also slowly being ripped and copied up to the server. LPs are not really a problem at this point; I have a… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}