I reread my post and it does seem unintentionally over-generalized. In regards to organizing documents, I totally and whole-heartedly agree with everything you’ve said about folder structure in efficiency tip #41! Folders are indispensible and sorely under-utilized by most people. It doesn’t take much time to set-up a very intuitive system where virtually everything is easily retrieved.

Further, I recommend people use a similar folder structure for email. I often have people request copies of emails from me because they know I can put my hands on them in seconds.

Photos are a different story, though. Although chronology is one obvious way to organize photos, sometimes it is cumbersome for retrieval. Even though Memory Manager appears to use a traditional folder structure, the major difference is that you can have one picture in several different folders WITHOUT having multiple copies of the picture residing on your hard drive. This tagging system saves space and makes non-chronological searching much faster and easier.

It is also not necessary to create different folders for different dates of the same reoccurring event (like Christmas) because there is a built in time-scale feature. So all “Christmas” pics can go in the same folder and the time scale tool allows you to pull photos by date using specific or fuzzy logic (“December 2005″ or “winter 2005″).

For example, my daughter Emily recently had to do a “Marvelous Me” presentation about her life. If my photos had been organized chronologically in different folders, I would have had to open many, many folders to pull the relevant pictures from her 7 3/4 year life span. Instead, I was able to select the “Emily” folder so she could choose from any picture that had her in it. You may have a similar set-up with traditional folders, but that means you are making multiple copies of the same picture in order to cross-reference.

Similarly, your lovely daughter could make a neat father’s day gift by selecting the “Kayla” folder and the “Alvin” folder. The program allows you to speficy whether you want to see all photos in both folders or just the ones that overlap between folders. By selecting from the pictures found in both, she can quickly to do a special album or slideshow about the two of you (think venn diagramming here).

This cross-referencing and tagging functionality is what makes this program unique and, in my mind, superior to a traditional folder structure on a hard drive.

As for backups, your thoroughness is probably the exception to the rule. I can’t put my hands on the source of my statistic, but I read recently that something like one out of every 3 digital photos taken and meant to be saved are mistakenly deleted. I can’t tell you how many people I meet who 1) leave their pictures on their camera cards and just buy new cards (really!) or 2) leave all their pictures on their computer thinking they are “safe” without backing them up. The computer is the new 21st century version of the photo shoebox under the bed. (-:

I still am very distrustful of the long-term viability of data storage. In the 14-16 years since my husband and I left college, we’ve migrated data at least three times. (See here:
http://staff.bbhcsd.org/schinkerj/archives/2007/02/06/print-is-dead/
and here: http://staff.bbhcsd.org/schinkerj/archives/2007/06/01/obsolete-media/
for details). This is a far cry from the 140+ years and counting that traditional printed photographs last (albeit properly stored and cared for).

I think this discussion of backups and long-term storage will continue to evolve as data retrieval problems escalate for the common user.

You may be generalizing a little too much. CMMM may be great for organizing photos, but it won’t help with your documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints and web pages. Judging from the screen shot at the link you provided, CMMM does use folders. To the left of the pictures is clearly a multi-tiered folder structure. It looks like CMMM manages the folder system so that it a user doesn’t have to manually do it.

As a teacher or student using multiple computers in a school, keeping files organized is critical. My students use USB flash drives. On those drives they use the “one folder per project” rule. A typical student will have four or five courses each semester. Each course will have four or five projects. A project may have as many as ten supporting artifacts (documents, pictures, presentation). This could amount to 250 individual documents each semester. During a four-year program, that’s 2000 documents. Without planned file management (using folders) it will be complete chaos.

DVDs are but one backup solution. At fifteen cents per disk (that was the cost of the last batch I bought), there are not many less expensive options. I have thousands of DVDs in my archives and I have never had one give me problems when I needed to retrieve something. I also have CDs going back to the late 90s. The same goes for them… I haven’t had problems getting to old information.

I take care of my archives. They are in a dark, cool closet in cases.

Personally I use USB hard drives for my day-to-day backups. It’s the only way I can afford to backup all 130 GB of my data on a daily basis.

I have to respectfully disagree about the multiple levels of folders folders being the only way to go. Memory Manager has truly revolutionized photo sort and search – and the more photos you have, the better it will work for you! Yur system seems to work great for you, but please check out http://www.cmmemorymanager.com for more details. I truly believe that this product is a better way to sort, organize, store, and retrieve pictures than any other program out there.

As for using DVD’s as backups for photos – they are really quite vulnerable to damage. They also build-up over time, especially with the number of photos you take. Memory Manager has a neat feature which automatically creates a duplicate “shadow” copy of itself elsewhere and updates every change when the program is closed. I use this feature to backup to a server so I don’t have to deal with all the DVD backups or figuring out what was or wasn’t backed up.