Best Digital Product Organizer?

[chuckdee]

I wrote an article about organizing PDFs. I have thousands and find this process works for me:

Organize RPG PDFs and Other Digital Stuff

One effective way to organize digital RPG material is by making a directory structure of "RPGs", game system, publisher (if needed), and product type (if needed). For example /RPGs/5e/Sly Flourish/la...

slyflourish.com

After reading that, I have one suggestion for you in terms of search - Everything on Windows and ProFind on Mac. mdfind and locate are fine, but ProFind is better. And Everything is just better than Windows find.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Do you put everything there? That's where I have my untouched stuff, but I don't put things I actually access there.

I put a lot of stuff there. Because I have some stuff on my Pi that is only on the Pi, that stuff gets pushed to Glacier since its not on my mac and thus not backed up with Time Machine.

But my vital "Documents" directory (which has things like the in-design files for all of my books) gets backed up to tons of places. I think its on four local disks backed up at least weekly, two cloud storage systems backed up at least weekly, and one offline copy backed up every six months.

Also, I'll check out ProFind! It looks really great and very reasonably priced. Thank you for the recommendation!!

 

[John Dallman]

I just keep stuff organised in folders on my laptop, by game system and in some cases by line within a system. For reading them I use Sumatra PDF. If I need to search PDFs in detail, Agent Ransack does the job with regular expressions.

 

[chuckdee]

I just keep stuff organised in folders on my laptop, by game system and in some cases by line within a system. For reading them I use Sumatra PDF. If I need to search PDFs in detail, Agent Ransack does the job with regular expressions.

Have you tried Everything? If so, why Agent Ransack over Everything?

 

[paradisebunny]

Hi all, I’ll comment because no one seems to use my solution: In addition to the usual nested folders for the entire collection, I keep the stuff I am currently reading / use frequently in Apple Books. That has three advantages, it looks pretty to see your PDFs with covers and all for browsing, the search works well, it syncs markup perfectly (!) and it makes the reading experience across devices great (notably iPad, phone, Mac).

 

[John Dallman]

Have you tried Everything? If so, why Agent Ransack over Everything?

I had not heard of Everything before your posting. Having looked at its website, I do not fancy it. Agent Ransack is considerably simpler, without a database, NTFS interface, and other complexities.

 

[chuckdee]

They aren't really complexities that you're exposed to, but fair enough. I just unzip it and run it.

 

[Nikosandros]

They aren't really complexities that you're exposed to, but fair enough. I just unzip it and run it.

I had never heard of Everything before this thread. I've downloaded and tried it. I see that it has a lot of interesting features, like support for regular expressions, but the "basic" usage is extremely simple and it works great for me for finding stuff (I have a ton of files scattered all over the place).

 

[John Dallman]

They aren't really complexities that you're exposed to, but fair enough. I just unzip it and run it.

I'm cautious about software that gets really intimate with Windows, and I've had some bad experiences with data indexing systems with bugs.

 

[chuckdee]

I'm cautious about software that gets really intimate with Windows, and I've had some bad experiences with data indexing systems with bugs.

It's been around for years, and voidtools is respected as a developer. But I'm all for using whatever tools that you feel comfortable with and what works for you. Just wanted to make sure that impression about it being complicated to use in its basic use was dispelled.