I’m just curious how people organize their files. I have no method at the moment so they’re a bit all over the place. Working on coming up with a plan before it gets too out of hand.
I mostly use Fusion 360 which I think are online but can save locally. I sometimes use OpenSCAD which obviously has files. Then I’ve got SVGs and DXFs and sometimes I save the Estlcam projects. Then of course the gcode files.
I’m thinking I probably want to store them all in folders by project. I’m debating storing these in a Git repo for version control.
Then I use the Jackpot and right now I’m just dumping gcode files in the root of the SD card.
I’ve done this two ways with my 3d print files (cnc just followed suit)
My current favorite is to have a designing folder where I am making the designs/files for projects and a manufacturing folder where the project files and codes go into.
It makes some redundancies by having two folders for a single project but I like keeping the designing process separate as I use designs for multiple things and some designs don’t get used.
Hmm, that brings up a good point since it’s probably worth keeping track of what’s in-progress vs “complete”. Having a separate manufacturing folder would also make it simpler to keep in sync with the SD card.
In onshape or google drive, my files are sorted by most recent and easy enough to search for. That is honestly my desired sorting format. On the very rare occasion that doesn’t cut it, I probably saved time remaking it vs sorting a thousand files I will never use again. I don’t keep gcode (the machine may have changed enough to invalidate them anyway).
On my computer I try to be roughly organized. But I also use Linux and can search pretty well on the command line (or sort by most recent). Mostly I need to keep home and work separate and projects separate so they don’t interfere with each other.
I learned a long time ago that storage gets cheaper faster than I can produce files. So I have a giant pile of unsorted backups from computers that have been dead for a decade. I do rarely need to go into them and it stinks. But less work than sorting everything and deciding what to keep. That doesn’t apply to videos, music, or photos. I keep those in a different storage place on my nas and they are sorted into one folder deep structures that make it easy to insert and easy to find something by name or date. I clean those off of computers before making backups.
I imagine for most purposes that’s probably true. I’m not sure how often I’ll be re-cutting something over and over again.
I’m inclined to keep it for reference. Although, even if the machine doesn’t change, there’s a reasonable chance I get better at feeds and speeds along the way.
For my 3d printer, I use Cura and it always prefixes the filenames with the machine name. Something like that might be helpful to me. I feel like if I hang out here long enough, I’m going to end up with like 8 CNC machines.
Hey, me too! Trying to work on my data hoarding tendencies. I almost never look at those.
Mine are sorted by type. Subdirectories where needed.
A ‘project’ will use the same filename, different file extensions in each directory. Version numbers denote iterations if I don’t want to overwrite the existing one.
All of these are auto-synced between the house and shop computers using Seafile.
If it’s a big thing I will do a specific folder for it. And inside that folder I will have dxf folder and a final version folder.
I have issues with naming some files for my old printer it seems it messes things up if I have too long a name for the svg file.
Now that really surprises me! I "almost"lost all my stuff back in the day when a backup hard drive was 20GB; my backups were a complete mess, I had one backup drive and one Powerbook which was synced to my iMac, so even though there was no order I had three copies of everything.
Then in one day, I sold the iMac, decided to properly backup everything using a backup app (SuperDuper, which I still use twenty years on) and erased and initialised the backup drive to set the process in motion. That was exactly when the Powerbook hard drive died.
Since then, I keep backups on two completely different drives (hourly with Apple Time Machine and daily with Super Duper) and honestly a commercial “cloud” setup offsite is no more expensive than hard drive replacement.
Back to the topic though - I started numbering each project and part as I did in the good old design office days, neatly keeping a spreadsheet register of each project - then I realised it’s the 21st century and I file them by project alphabetically with a descriptive name for their folder. A simple search finds all, and there’s a thumbnail to refer to as well.
