I’m forever saving things on my desktop, and then comes a day where I wonder where I got so many files from!
All my downloads (when it prompts me to save the file, and i'm in a hurry I usually save it on my desktop to make my life easier to quickly access it!) and temporary files that I copy to the desktop and edit them, just never get archived!
They just get thrown in a folder called my desktop 2010.. (depending on the year if I’m in high spirits!) and from that point on.. I am just totally lost about what I have, what is what.. and always wonder "where did I save that file.. and what was its name when I last saved it on my desktop??"
Once again, WinAutomation, can make wonders!
I created a job that will work on a daily basis, or I will set a keystroke trigger and move all the files and folders from the desktop to a specific directory within a folder named after the current date. This job can also be used in combination with other jobs such as compare files to find duplicates and make sure you don’t have files listed in more than one folders and directories. But lets start with organizing this first before getting much deeper.
To start with.. we get the current date and convert it to text. We then tell it to create a folder using the current date in a specific preset folder.
We can also set a condition that if the folder name does not exist, it should create it.
(if we used this job on an other computer it would look for the folder we have set up, so we make sure the folder we want exists before we try moving files and folders or creating folders within it, just to make sure we get no errors)
We let it know that we want to move all the files and folders that exist on our desktop and we then tell it to separately move the files (from the root folder alone) and then for each folder that is on the desktop, we tell it to move it to the folder we previously created.
If we do not tell it to move the files on the desktop alone and also the folders on the desktop alone, but move all the files that also exist in any subdirectories of our desktop folder, all it will do is move all files from the desktop folder and the files in the subfolders, but it will not keep the folders structure, so if you have 5 folders and 3 files on your desktop and each folder contains two files, you will end up with 1 folder named after the current date with a total of 13 files but no clue of what came from where!
So we use a move folder action and put it in a loop so that it moves all the folders and all the files within them in the new folder.
This way you can always keep an archive of what you were doing each day on your computer and what files you had been working on, and also keep track of the changes a file has gone through. It's also good cause you can move the files you put in the archive folder yesterday, use them today and all you will have to do tomorrow is access the last created folder in the archive (And you can tell which that one is .. since it's date stamped!!)
Post new comment