search for single repository

Posted by Chris Thompson
Nov 2, 2008 at 06:56 AM

I guess one has to start with their own personal definition of a single repository. For me, it doesn’t make sense to store everything in one place, e.g. email is already stored in an email client (why duplicate?), RSS is already in an RSS client, likewise with media and photos. All of this is searchable in a single systemwide search with modern operating systems.

The need for a heterogeneous repository in my view is largely for things that don’t have a more natural “home.” Saved web pages, scanned newspaper articles, PDF files, audio recordings from meetings, miscellaneous notes and outlines, snippets of thoughts. If I wasn’t storing that somewhere, it would just start to accumulate on the desktop, so doing nothing isn’t really an option. Using the filesystem is fine (and better than clunky software, for sure), but you end up with things that should be in more than one topic or directory and it’s difficult to work organically with subsets of the items for short term projects. Good software can help here. Obviously one might have a handful of repositories for different types of information (e.g. work-related/personal) too.

—Chris