This of course is a question that touches philosophical borders! Back in the days Kant was talking about categories and when organizing the harddisk, you have to think of categories too. In my thinking i try to avoid categories, or better: to always re-think categories, to let the thinking be fluid and organic. But the computer need directories and files that have a 100% clear path and after all you end up with a hell of mishmash on your local disk.

I have reinstalled my system and my harddisk is now free. I only installed applications i need everyday and loose all the dead files and directories on the pc. This is feeling really lightweight now! There is a directory for mp3, that one for my grafics etc. Very fine categories. But it is just matter of time, when the first files arrive, that does not fit in any of this categories. A very great source of -don’t know where to store this file- is Andreas lovely blog Glück Auf. I used to open a directory “stuff” and to put all files in there. Before the new installation i made a backup of this “stuff”. This “stuff” now lies on the server next to “old stuff” and “older stuff” and “quite more older stuff” waiting for the day to be cleaned up. I’m afraid that day will never come. Why just delete this stuff? No, there could be very precious and rare files between them! Besides: this is the same problem, why minimalistic interior design is not working in everyday situations. There is always that stuff.

Solution?

The solution: i tend to only store files on local disk that are able to fit a category and that i really need. All other files just take too much space. And they can be everytime downloaded from the internet when you are on a fast internetconnection. That keeps everything fluid and brings us back to the opening philosophical question: what about categories, what should we store? In the harddisk only belong files that you need everyday. In the archive only belong files, that are not available anymore on the net: old but good softwareversions (i.e. winamp 2.9), raries and special releases (i.e. music releases), personal rubbish that isn’t worth beeing uploaded into the net.

This sounds good, but is in my opinons far too optimistic. Some lazy days and the disk is full again with stuff. And some files i jsut want to store for some days/weeks. Any other ideas? Leave a comment!

[18Jun05] Update: The (philosophical) question remains open. What files should we store?