alt Hacker News(HFS here means “hierarchical file system”, i.e. one with nested folders.)
I tire of the either-or dichotomy. Yes, search is great. But a couple years ago, I adopted Johnny Decimal[0] for storing my archive files and I couldn’t be happier. Our 2023 tax filings are in 22.23. Physics articles are in 34.04. Her CME records are in 43.03. Go into one of those and you’ll find every file I have related to those things.
And they’re still searchable. You can still do tag-based queries, indexed text searches, and all that, but you don’t have to. When I want all my 2025 tax deduction receipts come tax filing time next year, I’ll send the contents of 22.25 to my accountant and be done with it, confident we found 100% of the related files.
I don’t do those for everything. Music files are in their own directories. Movies live with movies. I don’t try to shoehorn Obsidian into it. But all my long-term storage files go straight to their home in JD.
This has the huge benefit that I can instantly locate them when I’m accessing the archive from my phone, my wife can find things without learning special tooling or the vagaries of search, and there’s zero need for any additional apps or software beyond Finder.
I love using great search software. I used Devonthink daily for years. But I also adore not having to.
Replies
May I also suggest trying this for the individual files? For instance, for a receipt/invoice of a value of date be `2025-06-04 $42 Description of the File.EXT`.
That way, for a tax year `2024` containing expense receipts, the accountant or us can just look at the file name to confirm. If you still need to look, then opening the file works.
I can only assume this is at least a spiritual ode to Dewey Decimal? Looks neat.
I had hoped you meant that not being "either-or" would be that you should be able to get "realized hierarchies" on things. Where you could basically ask the computer to build a hierarchy on the fly.