Storing all things digital

Nov 12, 2016
77
58
This question is interesting as rather than dealing with physical organisation of things such as props, books & dvd's it deals with the organisation of any magic related products which are digital such as pdf's, video instructions etc.

I used to store all of my digital magic stuff straight onto the internal drive on my computer, but with a lot of hours of video and thousands of pages scattered across different pdf's I decided to go out and buy a 1TB external hardrive to keep all of my digital magic stuff.

This allows me not only to have a place to keep my existing stuff but gives me the space to back up (Download) online streaming videos, back up my dvd's so that I have a digital copy (Video file) incase one of my dvd's becomes damaged.

Now onto the actual question, how do I organise all of this data into suitable categories (Folders)?

Obviously first of all I would split everything into folders labled "Books" "Video" etc. but from there what? In terms of video I tried splitting into categories such as Cards, Coins, Mentalism etc. but these categories were to broad and didn't compensate for stuff that maybe used a mix of cards and mentalism. So I tried plot instead. For example in the Cards folder, as sub folders may be Torn & Restored, Colour change, 4 of a kind production etc. but take a recent purchase of mine, The vault by David Penn, would that belong to the plot ring flight or nest of boxes. Maybe I could try grouping depending on the creator of the effect?

The same question applies on the pdf (Book) side of thing. What do I group by?

Responses and ideas are much appreciated.

Regards,
Tom
 
Sep 2, 2007
1,182
119
31
Houston, TX
I really need to get an external hard drive but for now I use a terabyte of cloud storage I've got with Microsoft. Anyway, I like things to be organized but you can break these things down into so many different categories but for me it just gets confusing trying to do it that way.

I have one folder titled 'Magic.' Inside this folder I have one folder for magic videos and one folder for magic books (and other folders which I'll explain). Just about every video goes in the video folder (dvd SETS are in their own folder inside this folder) and every book is in the book folder. The exceptions, though, are the magic products that include a lot of pdfs or additional files along with their videos. These are the other folders alongside 'Magic Videos' and 'Magic Books.' Currently I have a folder for 100th Monkey, Lotto Fever 2.0, Silent Treatment, and Speakeasy. I hope this is easy to understand, I tried to outline it below incase it doesn't lol

Magic
>
Magic Videos
  • Bunch of videos (Josh Jay's Unreal has it's own folder in here as does Eric Jones Metal Collection)
> Magic Books
  • Bunch of book PDFs
> Speakeasy
> 100th Monkey
> Lotto Fever 2.0
> Silent Treatment

Another thing I'm able to do with the cloud storage is add tags to these files. It'd take a while but I could label all the ones that are close up, cards, coins, etc and use as many tags as I need to on one video. Now I can search the tags I've created (ex. "cards, mentalism") and it'll show me only the relevant files. You probably wouldn't be able to do this with an external hard drive but it shouldn't be hard to write a program to accomplish this or something similar.
 
Nov 12, 2016
77
58
I really need to get an external hard drive but for now I use a terabyte of cloud storage I've got with Microsoft. Anyway, I like things to be organized but you can break these things down into so many different categories but for me it just gets confusing trying to do it that way.

I have one folder titled 'Magic.' Inside this folder I have one folder for magic videos and one folder for magic books (and other folders which I'll explain). Just about every video goes in the video folder (dvd SETS are in their own folder inside this folder) and every book is in the book folder. The exceptions, though, are the magic products that include a lot of pdfs or additional files along with their videos. These are the other folders alongside 'Magic Videos' and 'Magic Books.' Currently I have a folder for 100th Monkey, Lotto Fever 2.0, Silent Treatment, and Speakeasy. I hope this is easy to understand, I tried to outline it below incase it doesn't lol

Magic
>
Magic Videos
  • Bunch of videos (Josh Jay's Unreal has it's own folder in here as does Eric Jones Metal Collection)
> Magic Books
  • Bunch of book PDFs
> Speakeasy
> 100th Monkey
> Lotto Fever 2.0
> Silent Treatment

Another thing I'm able to do with the cloud storage is add tags to these files. It'd take a while but I could label all the ones that are close up, cards, coins, etc and use as many tags as I need to on one video. Now I can search the tags I've created (ex. "cards, mentalism") and it'll show me only the relevant files. You probably wouldn't be able to do this with an external hard drive but it shouldn't be hard to write a program to accomplish this or something similar.
Thank you for taking the time to reply.
 

Josh Burch

Elite Member
Aug 11, 2011
2,966
1,101
Utah
I use my Kindle Fire to store all of my eBooks along with some of my videos. These are also on my laptop and a hard drive. I like the idea of it all being on my tablet for portability sake.
 

RealityOne

Elite Member
Nov 1, 2009
3,744
4,076
New Jersey
Interesting. I've just been wondering the same thing about how to arrange my books. About four years ago I arranged them by catagory and author. As I've gotten more books, they have been put on the shelf grouped by when I bought them. I got Tarbell and Apocalypse at the same time, so they are next to each other. Carnecopia, Random Acts of Magic and Five Points were purchased together so they are grouped together.

After thinking about this for a while, I decided to go Alphabetical by Author. That works well for all my books by Jean Hugard, John Bannon, Roberto Giobbi and Jim Steinmeyer. However, "Best of Slydini" is under F for Karl Fulves and The Books of Wonder, Carneycopia, Relaxed Impossibilities and Vanni Bossi are all under M for Stephen Minch. That works for me because I can remember who wrote the books and there are few exceptions.

My next task is to index the materials I have. I was thinking of using something like Denis Behr's Conjuring Archive by having a spreadsheet with author, title, effect, page, creator, prior history, subsequent history and notes columns. That will be a big task.

I do have one question... how do you back up a DVD so that you have a digital copy? I'd love to put all my DVDs on an external storage drive so I can watch them on devices that don't have a DVD player.
 
Sep 2, 2007
1,182
119
31
Houston, TX
I do have one question... how do you back up a DVD so that you have a digital copy? I'd love to put all my DVDs on an external storage drive so I can watch them on devices that don't have a DVD player.

This program, Handbrake, will do the trick for you and it's free too! If your computer is like mine and doesn't have a dvd drive, you can get an external one pretty cheap.

Handbrake can rip unprotected DVDs by default, but there's one extra download you'll need in order to get around DVDs with copy protection. Here's a walkthrough of the whole process using Handbrake including the extra download: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-rip-a-dvd-to-your-computer-5809765

NOTE: These instructions are intended for PERSONAL USE ONLY, please DO NOT take this as a way to copy/redistribute magic DVDs (I know you know this @RealityOne , just thought I should leave it just in case).
 

bigscotty

Elite Member
I used to store all of my digital magic stuff straight onto the internal drive on my computer, but with a lot of hours of video and thousands of pages scattered across different pdf's I decided to go out and buy a 1TB external hardrive to keep all of my digital magic stuff.

I know you're asking about organization, but the real life saver (regardless of your organization scheme) is backing up.

I also have a 1TB external drive where I put a lot of digital downloads. I also write a lot of sketch comedy and theatre stuff, and Dropbox has saved my butt many times over (e.g., migrating from old to new computer, "where did I put that file," reverting to an old version of a file, not having to re-purchase a file I already bought because of random dumb reason).

The problem is money. Dropbox and Google Drive are around $10/month for 1 TB. I've not checked Carbonite or any others in quite some time.

Cheers.
 
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