Speaking of Gmail, Google Desktop and maybe Picasa; maybe you should take the time to investigate and write an article that points out the privacy issues that may be involved.

E.g. Google scans all your emails for keywords to display related ads. I don’t know how many information from Google Desktop are sent back to google or are processed by Google for whatever reason. I do know, that Picasas new faces feature gets processed by Google servers, which essentially means, Google knows about all the people you name in Picasa, maybe even their Emailadresses.

There are no known privacy data leaks with google yet, but I’m scared by the thought of how much person related information Google piles.

Here in Germany the current topic of public interest is Google Street View. Many cities and states are concerned about how to protect people’s privacy. It is demanded that Google removes any faces and on request images of houses from their raw data. Essentially it doesn’t matter what’s online for everyone to see. If Google turns bad only think about linking recognized faces from Picasa with faces on Streetview pictures, emails and desktop search keywords and you get a pretty detailed and precise profile from someon.

I’m not to suggest any conspiration theorie or scare anyone. I just want to sensitize for the potential risks of personal information in a single hand.

And while we’re on it: What about an article about GPG encrypted Emails. It’s free, pretty simple and effective, yet not useful until a majority of people use it.

But I made one simple change which has eased my mind — I just renamed the folder “File Cabinet.” After all, the files in there are searchable, just as if they were all neatly sorted into subfolders.

So now I just toss files in there (non-work-type things: articles, recipes, misc. PDFs, etc.), and they’re “filed” (at least I can pretend they are), and it doesn’t bother me any more. (I suppose I should really stop saving so many files, but it’s a hard habit to break — and I really do go into that folder to find things.)

ccleaner from http://www.ccleaner.com – Cleans up uneeded and junk files.

Clutterkiller from http://www.datagoround.com – Cleans up and organizes desktop and file system. Also has a great assortment other clutter tools.

Evernote from http://www.evernote.com – with this I save important info and emails, you can delete the original file or email once it’s stored in evernote.

To hp: I’ too am suspicious of Google Desktop &, sadly, even gmail. Instead of GD or Spotlight, I’ve installed a great open-source (=free) program called ‘Launchy’ which works just as well and isn’t linked to a mega-corp. Plus it learns your frequently used files, drives, bookmarks, & web destinations so that, eventually, you only have to type in a single letter for it to guess where you want to go. Very cool & very fast.

ps: I check lifehacker.com every day too (via RSS) and find it incredibly useful for simplifying, streamlining, and personalising my computer (not to mention my non-computer life, if there is such a thing…)

I also scan every important piece of paper (bills, correspondence, ebay…) and throw it into my dms into a simple folder structure (name of correspondent), put the date in front of the name and throw away the original paper if it is not important (for example bills, letters from someone…) and keep only the really important stuff (insurance…)

I can categorize every document again, if I need (”bills paid”, “bills unpaid” for example) and the dms makes a full text search if I can’t remember the filename.

I tried and uninstalled Google Desktop, because I don’t want to have a program on my computer from a company, which earns money with indexing foreign information.
And Google Desktop reduces the speed of every computer and I can’t exclude certain folders on my harddrive or certain emailaccounts.

For pictures I recommend iPhoto from Apple or Picasa, which allows you to name one download from the camera (e.g. “travel to Egypt”) and indexes every picture with the time when it was shot. And I can categorize every picture, if I want it.

I don’t like online-storage, because I don’t have any control what the company, which provides the storage, will do with my data in the future. Many people are way to optimistic. Every company has only one goal: Earn money. Nobody wants to make people happy, thats a lie….

As Google puts it: “Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. It’s a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks.” http://desktop.google.com/features.html

1. in the Finder, setup a new folder for file searches (actually, there is one already available via the Sidebar or at “~/Library/Saved Searches” (the tilde “~” in that means your user folder/directory), this is where you will setup your searches (for example all “PDF” files, or all files/folders with the Spotlight Comment “Woodworking”)
2. go through your existing folder structures to find all your files/folders that relate to each topic you want to “search” for in the future and take note of them
3. okay, now go to your Applications Folder and launch Automator; therein under Actions > Library > Files & Folders, select “Label Finder Items” and drag it into the right-hand pane of Automator (then do the same with “Set Spotlight Comments for Finder Items”). Choose a colour and add a descriptive word or short phrase into the Spotlight Comment section (make sure to have the “Append to existing comments” box checked). Now go to the File Menu and save it as a Plug-in (select Finder Plugin from the following window and give it a name). Repeat this for as many “comments” as you want; I have 8 sofar and it’s working well.
4. now, go into your selected folder (in my case, call it Woodworking) and select a file/folder, then right-click your mouse and under the Automator item, select your “Woodworking” comment action. Once the action has run (check your Menubar for it), go and get information on the file you just changed and check the Spotlight Comments, it should be updated. If it was, things are working properly, so you can now select all files and folders in that directory/folder and apply the new Automator “Woodworking” action.
4. now save the same comment; but this time as a Folder Action and attach it to the folder you want to (this will add the comment to the and file/folder dropped or added to the folder the action is attached too).

In essence, this is exactly what meta-tags are, but here, you are building the functions yourself for free (not having to buy some software that mightn’t meet your needs). It’s not for everyone and I might find I hate it in 6 weeks; but it’s fun and a start (and I have about 10 000 files to apply this too (where’s my computer “scuba” gear?!?).

This will add much more control to your Spotlight searches and I suspect the Windows Vista/XP crowd have a similar functionality that could be equally refined/tweaked.

I find myself keeping all my gmail because sometimes I like to refer to some information in emails gone past… and gmail’s search function is very easy/accurate. I’d like a search function like that on my computer, because that would make folders almost completely unnecessary.

Going to check out Google Desktop now.

Also, I agree with others that banning clutter on your desktop is a crucial step towards organizing your computer.

Reclaiming Space:
There is an amazing little PC app called SpaceMonger that simply draws you a map of the contents of any drive or folder by size. It is a wonderful way to find what is really eating your hard drive space and those huge video files you’ve forgotten and don’t need any more.

My external harddrive however is beyond hope I think!

My filing cabinet is shaking in its boots.

(The indexing idea is great too…I like that idea for my house files, mortgage and property docs that are more difficult to scan and which you need paper/signed copies of.)

I don’t keep many paper files. I used to, but it became difficult to remember if something was in a paper file or on the computer. Gradually, I just adopted a workflow where everything I create ends up on the computer.

As you point out, one way to integrate your paper file and computer file systems would be to have them mirror each other. But you still have to remember what is located where. You might also think about creating an index file on the computer where you make a notation for anything that you store in a paper file. That way there’s a better chance of having it come up in a search.

The other option would be to try to get everything you need to save and reference later on the computer where you’re able to search for it. What good is it to save documents if you can’t find them and use them when you need to? Paper files are time consuming to search even if they’re very well organized. And if they’re just sort of jumbled together, well that makes things even worse. Erin posted awhile back about Fujitsu’s ScanSnap paper scanner. It’s a pricy option, but it comes with Adobe Acrobat Pro, which includes very usable OCR (optical character recognition) which helps to make otherwise unsearchable documents into searchable ones.

Good luck, and we’d love to hear what solution you come up with!

I’m a freelance comms/writer person too. My big challenge isn’t so much storing electronic files–I’ve been doing this a long time and have a system that works for me. But where I struggle is in the link between electronic files and hard copy files. You’ll know this as a writer: you can’t escape paper in this business. There are always notes, background content, etc. to keep on file for a project. Unlike the Zen Habits guy, I can’t work solely on a computer screen or my eyes would fall right out of my head and my brain would explode.

But I’ve never been able to perfect my paper filing system and it’s out of control…I’m curious how you do it…do you make it a mirror of your electronic files? How long do you hang on to paper client files? I’m swimming in old files that I’m afraid to get rid of and don’t have the time to go through.

Simply use TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is an awesome open-source file encryption program from TrueCrypt.org. Not only a great tool for encrypting, it is invaluable as an organization tool.

I have a 1.5gig file on my hard drive that I keep my applications and documents in. I have a copy of the same file on a USB drive and use TotalCommander to keep the files inside synchronized.

When I mount the TrueCrypt file, it opens with a new drive letter. On the new Drive letter, I have the following folders \Applications, \Documents, \Pictures, \(my website) and a few others. Everyone will have different ideas about how to organize their files, but I think we can agree that getting the folders closer to the root directory makes them much easier to get to.

For more information on my TrueCrypt installation, see:
http://www.ericsprojects.com/?p=248

And to read about the Applications I carry on my USB see:
http://www.ericsprojects.com/?p=213