Organization

I have always been a bit of a data hoarder, which means saving decades of my digital files on various media. Accessing and organizing all of that data can be quite challenging.

In college I used OneNote heavily for note-taking. OneNote has many handy features for a student, especially for annotation and hand-drawn diagrams. After college I shifted to mainly using markdown files. Individual text files freed me from being locked into proprietary software, and allowed me to use general context searching tools across all of my notes. I am in the process of testing out if a wiki would better serve my lifelong learning goals.

Plex is great for scanning and identifying my movies, and I usually run this service directly on my NAS or on a dedicated media computer.

Dumping all of the photos and videos taken on my mobile to the NAS helps keep those files backed up. I try to retain the file timestamps when possible. However Google Photos is usually my first stop when I’m trying to search for a particular image. The mobile data backup to NAS is primarily for archival and peace of mind.

Bookmark organization, saved Reddit posts, liked YouTube videos — this is where I spend a lot of time learning, and the most challenging data sets for me to keep organized. See Bookmark Organization.