Year-End Hard Drive Housekeeping

I download quite a few ebooks and other pdf files from the internet. A few months ago I took a couple of steps to help me manage these files.

The first step was to create a folder on my hard drive called pdf_to_review. I then created a shortcut to this folder and placed it in a prominent location on my desktop. My problem is that I download a ton of things and then I do not ever look at them.

By putting the shortcut on the desktop, almost in the way of other things, I gently remind myself that I have pdfs that I need to review. It is helping a bit, though I have about 100 pdfs to look at.

The second step I took was download and installing Google Desktop Search. I will sometimes print out a page from a pdf and then when I want to find the original PDF, I can never find it. With Google’s desktop search, I can index everything on my hard drive and do a quick search. It works really well. I can now find what I need.

As I was looking for a particular PDF this morning, I notice that I had quite a few directories that were filled with PDF files. I also has quite a few audio files, mp3s and wavs that I had downloaded from the web. Why were there so many different directories full of files?

I realized that before I had created my pdf_to_review directory, I had not had a common place for all of these files. I counted 6 directories and 176 files that were misplaced. To make matters worse, I had duplicate copies of many of these files.

I spent an hour or so doing a bit of housekeeping on my hard drive. I move all the files to either the pdf_to_review folder or to the archive folder, where the files go after they have been reviewed.

My plan is to figure out how to attach a note to each reviewed file to remind myself if it had any valuable information.

Let me know what you think,

Marc