For most of college, I’ve kept it simple: I’d create a directory in my home folder for each project, then eventually move older or inactive ones into ~/programming/. When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.
This setup has worked pretty well so far. But now that I’m graduating and my projects keep stacking up, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a more efficient system out there.
Curious—how do you all organize and store your projects? Any tips or methodologies that have made your lives easier over time?
The only person I’ve talked to about this is my mentor who’s been programming since the 60s (started on the IBM 1620 and Bendix G15) and he just mostly keeps projects in directories in his home directory and uses his godly regular expressions skills to find things that way. Makes me wonder if I’m overthinking it…
In terms of local storage, I usually have everything in
~/projects/project-name, and I don’t have tiny file size limits because I don’t use FAT32 filesystems — that’s the default filesystem you usually get on USB sticks and external hard drives you buy. You have to format those drives to something like EXT4 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) or you get stuck with FAT32 which has 2gb file sizes.You’ve forgotten about exFAT my dude. Nothing uses FAT32 anymore. All your usb drives will be exFAT.
That’s not been my experience. Lots of drives I’ve bought have been FAT32 out of the box.
What about exFAT? It overcomes FAT32’s limitation and is nearly readable on every OS and has way higher file size limits.
Edit: In case of external storage like USB/hard drive.
ExFAT is good for portable devices, but if you’re working with something internally, there’s no reason not to use EXT4 or NTFS.