Dealing With Duplicate Files
In the physical world, we encounter much difficulty because it’s hard to create copies of things: objects use finite resources and are expensive to produce, ...
filesystem
When to Delete Files
By now we’ve studied a variety of organizational questions relating to filesystems in detail. But here’s a seemingly foundational one we haven’t touched ...
Managing Temporary Files
So you’ve followed the tips in the design section of this series, and you have a nicely laid out, organized filesystem. That’s great when you know where ...
The Art of Naming Files: Naming Conventions
In the previous post, we focused on the mechanics of naming, things like what characters we should be using and how we can make files sort appropriat...
The Art of Naming Files: Mechanical Considerations
There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Anonymous
Filesystem Links: Practical Advice for Design
In the previous post in this series, we discussed what links are, why you would want to use them, and what kinds of links are available. This wee...
Filesystem Links: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
In a recent post, we discussed why hierarchies are a problematic way of organizing files and how we can squash our files into a hierarchy when we hav...
Getting Your Filesystem Hierarchy Less Wrong
All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less. motto of the Mutt email client
Starting Off with a Backup
What would happen to your digital life if your house suddenly burned down tomorrow? Would you be all right, or would you have yet another nasty problem piled...
Why Keep a Local Filesystem?
I like to start out my series here on Control-Alt-Backspace by discussing why you should care about the topic. After all, if I can’t convincingly answer that...
