After finding out the new release of Carbon Copy Cloner (donation-ware FTW! I don’t need no Super Duper… but it probably does have some nice features. Someone do a comparison, please!), I’m finally getting around to backing up my hard drive. The beta still looks like it’ll pass for what I need. It keeps track of files that were backed up and only updates the ones that have been changed since the last backup, which will save me oodles of time. Also, the ability to automate backups is awesome, as well.

This is… until Time Machine comes out. Tee hee.

I have a 160GB external, so what I’m going to do is have a 75GB Mirror of my hard drive, while use the extra space for extra media (movies, tv shows, you know… all the kinda legal stuff I have… and eventually my music, photos, videos if I start to run out of room on the 75 GB mirror).

This means… I’m going to spend a lot of time restructuring my folders. I’ll share my method of keeping sane what large amount of files I have, and maybe it’ll help you to organize your stuff.

As with all things Apple, they try to simplify your folder structure by giving you some folders to work with.

This is the folder structure of my users (~/jk) folder. This is pretty much the standard folder structure for all macs (except for that vmware folder for VMWare).

• Applications: Since this is under the Users directory, all it has is the CrossOver Internet Explorer Installed. This is no longer necessary because I have a computer that I can remotely connect to for all my IE testing from IE 4, 5, 5.5, 6, and 7… and so this folder will be empty.
• Desktop: Should be empty. Always. It’s kinda like my own version of a temp folder, with the added benefit of the folder’s content being in your face at all times, shouting “PUT THIS CRAP AWAY”.
• Documents: This is where we really see the JK organization shine. I have these folders:
  • blog: Folder for all my possible blog entries
  • bookshelf: PDF’s and other texts I’ve collected over the years, ranging in topics from programming to Korean cinema to entrepreneurship
  • desktopdev: Probably the least accessed folder… where all of my desktop development code exists. Needless to say… it hasn’t been touched for months.
  • etc: Personal files, Sermon notes, Sheet music, High School files… just lots of “et cetera” things
  • financial: All of my Financial documents; FAFSA, Income Tax…; categorized by years
  • job: Resumes, Cover Letters, Previous Job Informations; categorized by years
  • note: Notes I take during lectures, readings… just stuff I write down that I wouldn’t blog
  • restore: iCal backup database, Address book backups, Some application installers (you know… the kind that doesn’t come as a pretty single icon…), local MySQL backups
• Movies: Empty.
• Music: Not Empty. I spent some time fixing some more metadata of my songs today, and I feel like it’s pretty clean enough to make a backup with it. No need for making DVDs of it… cuz it would take… 8 DVDs or so to back it up properly.
• Pictures: There were two photos that were corrupt (I bet you, from the corrupt memory days…), which I fixed since I had a previous backup on a DVD. Thank goodness for backups…
• Sites: All of my website projects are kept locally here
  • iteration: Actual files from previous web projects
  • …project name…: Different client projects get their own folders, and are highlighted by color for ease of use
  • joshkim: For joshkim.org; css/html files for design and such
  • portfolio: The cleaner version of iteration, still need to make it prettier
  • source: Code I didn’t write, but will be referring to for guidance or pure copyage

This directory structure has been pretty good so far… but I have a feeling it’s going to change again the next time I do a planned back up. From now on, I’ll be doing backups every week; just not sure at what time and day, but I’ll be sure to set that sucker on automatic.

Next thing I have to do is start moving from OmniOutliner files to straight up text files. And to also solve the issue with saving extensionless “Document” type files that aren’t having the nice little purple TextMate logo (which show up in “More Info” as “Plain Text Document”).

I know, I’m OCD about these things… I found out a quick fix for this “issue” (more like… an annoyance) by just setting the extension of the file to be .txt.

I think this pretty much makes me ready for a backup. Time to go home and just let CCC do its job.

But first, more posts? It is indeed… March 1st… and I got nothing done today except get ready for this backup…