Your advice please..... how to organise a PC

richardvc

I recently had a thread asking whether or not I should upgrade to Windows 8 from 7. After considering all the responses I DID upgrade and it has been excellent.

So much so that it has made me consider how my PC plays a huge part in our everyday life and is central to how we run our house / finances etc etc

What I would like to know is how should you organise your PC ? ie photos / documents / music etc etc

The rest of our lives is very well organised but when I look at the PC it is all a bit scruffy !

We have a lot of photos and loads of MP3s which I have spent three days (so far) backing up to our cloud account.

I think I am asking how should I run and manage our PC so it is

1. As streamlined as possible
2. Easy on the eye ie not too cluttered
3. Simple to use
4. Organised
5. That all our important data is safe and secure in the cloud

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Richard

MrsE_2

Mine like yours could do with a tidy up, I'm not sure I know what im doing though!
Im on leave next week, so I will add it to my list of jobs.
Be grateful for any expert advice on here.

googler

Nobody can tell you how to organise your life to suit you.

Some people arrange their CDs or LPs by genre; others alphabetically by artist; others chronologically.

You have to find your own way for it to work for you.

Jivesinger

Assuming you upgraded to Windows 8 Pro, I would consider using Bitlocker encryption on files that you wouldn't want someone to see if your PC was stolen.

What I've done is set up a small VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file of a few Gb, which I can mount as a new drive letter, and then apply Bitlocker encryption to that drive letter. All of this is using features built-in to Windows 8 Pro.

This also means that I backup that VHD file to a separate disk and because it's encrypted, the backup is encrypted too.

You *could* use this approach to save it to the cloud, but my broadband allowance wouldn't allow me to download a multi-Gb file many times in a month.

You can do very similar things with free encryption product TrueCrypt, but I believe Truecrypt still doesn't claim to support Windows 8 (?).

Idiophreak

I've always organised mine just...logically, I guess...

I keep everything on a separate drive (so I can reformat as I fancy), then just organise in folders. eg:

d:\music\<artist>\<album>\
d:\pictures\holidays\2013\canaries_cruise\
d:\<user>'s documents\work\<employer>\<client>\
d:\video\series\funny\friends\season 5\

Some stuff is now stored in the cloud instead for ease of access.

The challenges I face are:
1) Being bothered to put everything in the right place.

2) Doing stupid nesting when I reformat or change pc...Tried to "unravel" this the other day...I'd ended up with something like
desktop\from old\desktop\old_desktop\pictures\camera\from_old\pix\....etc etc

Lazy and silly....bad idio!

Gratis

richardvc wrote: »

We have a lot of photos and loads of MP3s which I have spent three days (so far) backing up to our cloud account.

I think I am asking how should I run and manage our PC so it is

1. As streamlined as possible
2. Easy on the eye ie not too cluttered
3. Simple to use
4. Organised
5. That all our important data is safe and secure in the cloud

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Richard

:eek:

Photographs and documents are often irreplaceable.

Back up to more than one cloud service – preferably several.

I use nine - all free – in various combinations and for different purposes.


§

Jivesinger wrote: »

Assuming you upgraded to Windows 8 Pro...

Why?

Cisco001

Mine quite simple. OS + Program on SSD. Everything else on HDD. important files back up on external HDD.

I can't be border to upload on cloud as the upload speed is so slow.

Jivesinger

Gratis wrote: »

Jivesinger wrote: »

Assuming you upgraded to Windows 8 Pro

Why?

Because as far as Windows 8 Upgrades go, the Windows 8 Pro upgrade has consistently been cheaper (unless it's changed in the last couple of weeks since I last looked) than the non-Pro version, even though the Pro version is better.

This has been true for PC World/Amazon etc. throughout the life of Windows 8.

The only exception is if you buy from Microsoft direct, after the prices went up in February, but their prices are so hugely inflated, and this is a money-saving forum, so surely no-one here would do that...? :eek:

Weird_Nev

I just have the normal windows directories, I find they work well:

Users\me
Then documents - music - videos - photos

Virtually all our music, photos and videos are in the "shared" directory for communal access and simple streaming to the PS3 when we watch videos. It works fine with no set up whatsoever so I see no reason to change it.

The one thing I've found indispensable is Picasa. It's made organising, processing and publishing the thousands of photos we have a doddle.

Gratis

Jivesinger wrote: »

Because as far as Windows 8 Upgrades go, the Windows 8 Pro upgrade has consistently been cheaper (unless it's changed in the last couple of weeks since I last looked) than the non-Pro version, even though the Pro version is better.

This has been true for PC World/Amazon etc. throughout the life of Windows 8.

The only exception is if you buy from Microsoft direct, after the prices went up in February, but their prices are so hugely inflated, and this is a money-saving forum, so surely no-one here would do that...? :eek:

Many thanks for explaining it. :money:

Shall bear it in mind if ever I upgrade our Winbox to 8.

HappyMJ

I put everything I need into my dropbox folder and let in automatically back up to the internet and then back down to the other PC. No need for manual backups at all and if the hard drive dies I haven't lost anything.