Best Way To Organzie Files and Folders on a New Mac

By organizing your Mac with folders and maintaining a consistent structure, you can prevent it from becoming overwhelming to navigate, as mismatched files scattered across different locations can make it difficult to find what you need.

File Organization Systems

• PARA
• Johnny Decimal
• Access
• Flat File
• Zettelkasten
• GTD

Home Directory

• Recents is not a folder, but like a virtual stargate to many other places
• Keep your Downloads folder clean, and move your downloaded files to Documents and its subfolders
• Keep you Desktop folder clean, and move your screenshots to Documents/screenshots folder

iCloud Drive

Desktop & Documents Folders

If you enable this feature in your iCloud settings:

• Your Desktop and Documents folders, along with their contents, are moved from your home directory to iCloud Drive.
• New files created in these folders are automatically stored in iCloud.
• You can then access these files on all your other devices.

I choose to disable this feature because I don't have a paid plan with iCloud.

Turn off Desktop and Documents

System Settings >> iCloud >> Drive, disselect Desktop & Documents Folders

What happens when you turn off Desktop and Documents

When you turn off Desktop & Documents Folders, your files stay in iCloud Drive and a new Desktop and Documents folder is created on your Mac in the home folder.

However, there is a problem. Now you will have two sets of Desktop & Documents folders, each with an additional label, after the above reset:

• ~/Desktop: Desktop — Local

• ~/Documents: Documents — Local

• iCloud/Desktop: Desktop — iCloud

• iCloud/Documents: Documents — iCloud

I want to keep the Desktop & Ducuments folders locally in my home directory, but with the ugly — Local label removed. In the meantime, I want to delete the Desktop & Documents folders from iCloud. While the problem is that these two folders are recreated every time I delete them from the Finder. The same stupid regeneration happened over and over again when I tried to delete them from the iCloud web page.

The only solution was to drag the Desktop and Documents folders from the iCloud folder to other local folders in Finder and then delete them there. Handled this weay, the iCloud Drive will not recreate them automatically.

OneDrive

The ln command in macOS is a command-line utility used to create links between files and directories. It is primarily used to create two types of links: hard links and symbolic links (also known as symlinks).

Symbolic Links

ln -s /Users/yourusername/Documents /Users/yourusername/OneDrive/Documents

Preconditions for ln -s

1. The Source Path (/Users/alowree/Documents):

   • The source should exist. While you can technically create a "broken" or "dangling" link that points to a non-existent location, for the link to be useful, the source must be a valid file or directory.

2. The Link Name/Destination Path (/Users/alowree/OneDrive/Documents):

   • This is the most important precondition: The destination path must not already exist. If a file or folder with that exact name is already present at the destination, the ln command will fail with a "File exists" error.

How to Achieve Your Goal

If you have two existing folders and you want the OneDrive location to become a symlink to your main Documents folder, you must first remove the existing destination folder.

Here is the safe way to do it:

1. Check for Important Files: Look inside /Users/alowree/OneDrive/Documents. Are there any files in there that are not in /Users/alowree/Documents? If so, move them to your main Documents folder first.

2. Delete the Destination Folder: Once you are sure there is nothing unique in it, delete the folder that you want to replace with a link.

   rm -r /Users/alowree/OneDrive/Documents

3. Create the Link: Now that the destination path is clear, you can run your original command.

   ln -s /Users/alowree/Documents /Users/alowree/OneDrive/Documents

Rule of Thumb: For ln -s source destination:

• The source must exist.
• The destination must not exist.

Hard Links

I have not used this yet.