I use a simple two-level hierarchy. If you add one extra level to what you have, I think you'll find it works pretty well.

medical/eye-doctor

medical/dermatologist

bankA/account1234

bankA/account5678

bankB/account9999

https://johnnydecimal.com/ is a slightly more elaborate system. The basic idea is the same though, just have a fixed number of levels, it turns out 2 levels works very well. You don't need to overthink the categories at each level too much, e.g. maybe bankA + bankB could be "finance" instead.

finance/bankA-account1234

finance/bankA-account5678

finance/bankB-account9999

If there number of second-level directories gets out of hand, split it up into multiple, more-specific top level directories. If you just have 1 or two second-level directories, combine into a more generic top level directory.

Lets say you end up with 20 ish top level directories, and they each have 20 ish second level directories... now you cn have 400 ish directories (which is plenty), but you only have one "screenful" at each level to ls, navigate, etc.

Within each folder, the files are named YYYY-MM-DD-some-name.pdf. The second level folders are generally some individual/organization/account, and all the things pertaining to that relationship go in there - so, the eye doctor receipt goes in:

medical/joe-smith-md/2024-09-25-receipt.pdf

The joe-smith-md subfolder has all the things from that doctor... receipts, prescriptions, charts, whatever, with dated filenames.

I stopped organizing files, and I just use everything search all the time (https://www.voidtools.com/)

About 20 years ago I read a post on LifeHacker about having folders a-z (and one for numbers) at the top level and using that to avoid a never ended list of top level folders.

I set that up and still have it. It’s not my day-to-day management, but it’s my filing system. If I need to find my childhood vaccination records, I go to H/Health/vaccinations.txt

It’s not perfect. I need to remember what I called something. Health vs Medical or having separate sub folders that might live somewhere else… but I just do what makes sense to my brain at the time, and usually that’s where I end up looking later.

I’ve tried looking up more prescriptive systems, and they never work for me, because it works how someone else’s brain works, not mine.

I have some very broad categories as you mentioned, but since I take and screensnap countless pictures, I could really use: 1. OCR that goes into and tags every file, and 2. Image categorization.

Various services do one or the other (I dropped Evernote and don't use Google) but it would be nice on my private system. I use Apple picture tools mostly for amusement. They are extremely limited at categorizing.

I have been around computers long enough to know that any software which isn't open source will go away long before my data goes away, or will be M&A'ed into something more expensive with a subscription. So I don't venture far from basic tools, even though there may be some wonderful $1595.00 app out there.

I even lost the script that grabs the first line of a PDF with an inscrutable arxiv file name and renames the file.

I'm afraid that as an old-timer, I might become like young people who have no idea of a file system, and rely on search. Search could be a lot better with my two requests above. And FOSS, please, so tools don't vanish or get priced into the stratosphere.

KISS. In my home folder (*nix based):

  bin/
    ...all personal bash scripts can be found here...
  documents/
    audiobooks/
    backups/
    books/
    personal/
    projects/
    videos/
    work/
  downloads/
  hosts/
    ...sshfs to all important folders on several servers, no sync...
  images/
  music/
  share/
    ...for locally installed software, no sync...
  temp/
    ...remove all files in this folder once a month, no sync...

I have a top level "Projects" folder, one subfolder per project.

I have a "Clients" folder, One folder per other person or company, I'm doing anything for, a subfolder per project.

I have "Archive" which syncs to all my devices, and from my phone it syncs to Google Docs. From my laptop it is backed to a Synology NAS with the rest of my disk. I use it for things I will actually want to see in ten years.

I have music/videos/books folders, and I also have a "Collected" folder for anything downloaded that I think I want to keep(Sorted by category in a low effort manner).

I don't make enough for deductions to be a thing, so I don't really have any accounting to do that isn't already done by some cloud platform somewhere.

I don't see why multiple people's files would be in one account, that sounds like a hassle.

Move "away" from home:

  /away/
    3rd/
    doc/
    pub/
    src/

  database.sqlite

Import documents, photos, worthy personal projects, … delete all the rest!

Personally I use a single folder named "kb" (short for knowledgebase). This folder contains every single file I've considered worthy of saving. I keep backups and sync between all devices.

The secret is in the naming conventions. I've written about mine extensively here on HN [1], so I won't go into too much detail here, but for your receipt example I'd do `fin.receipt.[date].eye-doctor-visit.png`.

Family members files should be in those people's home folders. Mixing people on one account is just asking for trouble in my opinion. If they're an enumerable number of important documents, consider a central family folder which gets backed up frequently, with a subfolder for each person and one for shared family stuff.

- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370673#41373817

I will put stuff like tax returns and my apartment lease into iCloud and just delete everything else.

I never end up coming back to anything and thinking about organizing files is just not fun to me.