What do you use for organizing digital paperwork?
I used a third party app, but with the ai power in iOS, the sorting of documents that I need a copy of inside Notes app seems to do the job. Anything "important" that is also required to stay safe/encrypted, such as NDA contract or certain bank login details, I store as secure file inside 1password app. Everything else I keep as paperwork into a safe spot offline. So I know sneaky hackers can't get their hands on it. I also try to organize things in Notion - as it has a database feature basically that's very dynamic, so I can tailor it to my daily needs.
Editing because I accidentally hit post too soon!
Editing is fine
I do it all the time.
My sister is working on scanning thousands of family and event photos
Yeah my sister made this promise as well, but we made the step after losing our parents in 2019/2021, that she's the central point for that data, so it's not spread around everywhere. And when she gets around to it, she will make copies and whatnot, and we just share in the cost and get a copy of it. digital or offline, we will find out what we believe is best.
For my personal stuff, I store it in a DO-NOT-DELETE-EVER folder, basically. haha. and then I split it up in something like
/media/
/media/photos/
/media/movies/
/files/
/backups/timemachine/computername/
/backups/manual/extracopy-ofcertainfiles/
etc
And I split dirs up in personal/public/private, it will be private by default, until I decided if it's okay to publicly share, or if they are personal, .. for example, a public Instagram picture, versus a private family photo.
And I split up those dirs by year, or a range of years, depending on how much data is in there. this way I can just dump the pictures in a year, and deal with it later, but at least I know when I find it, based on the dir name, if it is recent, old, a copy, and if it is personal or private.
It sounds pretty complex, but it really isn't. and is it messy? yes, it still is. over the years you have multiple systems, and multiple backups, you end up with multiple duplicates, and not just in filenames like image001.raw, but also copy of a copy, and an edited version, and later Instagram version. it's tough to figure out which one is the original, or the corrected one that you wanna keep.
when I have time, I do try to name my files, videos I prefix with tags like master-appname-category-filename... and photos like original-iphone-category-filename .. but 9/10 times I forget to do it, or just focussed on the task, and not on file management.
But storage is cheap, and i rather have 3 copies or 30 copies, than. If I ever run into the duplicates, i quickly review it, potentially find more from older backups and purge what i don't need and keep the one, rename it, ..
anything important that i should never delete, like nda contract or some legal document, i tend to make sure it has a human readable filename, and i include -DND at the end of the filename (do not delete). so i don't accidentally delete it when i select like 1000+ files. because i can tell the scripts on macos to exclude files with -dnd in them.
For real cleaning, wife and I are doing a deeper clean on all the public spaces.
Welcome to OMG cleaning!
We have this thread to share exactly this, .. and to maybe help others remember they should clean windows or water plants as well haha. But also to find inspiration and motivation to do better, even if it's just 5 minutes a day. You will find this an active thread, and i make it mainly for myself (i mean, i post here for myself) knowing it's public, so i feel like i then have to actually do it, it's a way to hold myself accountable i guess.
