Workflows by profession

A student's file system

Updated 2026-07-31 · 4 min read

Four years, forty courses, one laptop. The structure decided in week one determines whether year-three-you can find anything.

The structure

University/
  2026-Fall/
    CS201/
      Lectures/   Assignments/   Notes/   Exam prep/
  Archive/
    2026-Spring/   ← whole semesters move here, intact

Semester-first, then course. At term's end the semester folder moves into Archive unchanged — nothing is reorganised, so nothing is lost, and the active tree stays small.

Names that survive

• Lecture slides as downloaded: lec07-graphs.pdf is fine — keep the number
• Your notes: 2026-09-14 CS201 graphs.md — date first, course, topic
• Assignments: CS201 hw3 v2.pdf, and the submitted version marked SUBMITTED

The submitted marker settles every "which file did I actually upload" panic, of which there will be several.

The searches that matter

• hw3 when the deadline looms
• The professor's name, for everything from one course
• A concept — dijkstra — across every course's notes, which is where content search

shines: mdfind -onlyin ~/University dijkstra

• Date-based: what did I write the week before the midterm

Group work

Shared drives (Google Drive, OneDrive via the university) hold the collaborative copy — and shared files die when someone graduates or the course's shared drive is retired. Export your copy of anything that matters at semester's end into the archive. The CloudStorage folder's search quirks apply in full.

Backup, said once

University work is irreplaceable and re-doable only at catastrophic cost. Time Machine to one cheap drive, from week one. Every year, students learn this the other way.

Common questions

How should students organise files on a Mac?

Semester-first folders, courses inside, and whole semesters archived intact at term's end.

How do I search all my lecture notes at once?

Content search over the university folder: mdfind -onlyin ~/University 'concept'.