Folders are where I put things that I want to search in vain for at a later date.
All seriousness aside, I absolutely love the APFS file system. Thanks to its copy-on-write functionality, I can make a nearly instant copy of a half-terabyte folder and perform a different analysis, edits, etc. on the items within, without taking up much more space.
My structure itself will probably bore folks. I don’t keep much in Documents, pretty much everything can be a “document”, and I sync with ResilioSync, so I have a few other folders set up to sync.
I have a folder ~/Databases with folders inside like Personal, then folders within like Inventory where there are PDFs documenting my autograph collection. Taxes, Health, etc.
I have a pair of external 2TiB SSDs as a RAID0 array where all the interesting stuff goes.
…/Research/aim1(aim2, etc.)
…/Research/fmri where I brainstorm and learn analysis techniques (with the aforementioned folder copies).
For each class I TA:
…/School/Neuro/Neurxxxx/Spr22 (Fall21, etc.)
Also a catch-all folder …/BigStuff for misc. oversized items.
All pretty standard stuff.
Some folder trees get deep, and past me had interesting opinions about where things should be (e.g. I have code, data, and stats folders, but stats has code, data, and stats files within). So I’ve been documenting everything in Curio with links to relevant files and folders, connecting lines for data flow and who is calling whom, etc. It’s a tremendous help with keeping up with things, and well worth the time spent documenting my pipelines.
Then there’s HoudahSpot for finding lost sheep, and I’m getting my tags cleaned up so I can make better use of them.