My experience with organizing files taught me not to consider the user home directory as owned by the user. The home directory is littered with lots of files that most software store there so my user data goes into its own subfolder.

Then I sort my files in directories with an unsual scheme, first directory is the importance of the files to me:

/buffer a space for file copies as I work on them and temporary files /collect for new files /datalibrary, /databank, /datastore, /datakeep are to separate data according to its importance to me for example the keep is a smaller size, encrypted and automatically backed up every day.

The second level of directories is the action related to the data, for example /listen will receive audio files, /watch video files, /look for pictures. other examples include /archive, /customize, /play, /install

Then depending on the content there is a sorting scheme where I either sort by genre, by theme, by name,… for example pictures, if a picture is worth keeping it could go in /by_genre/hispeed or /by_genre/tilt-shift, or in /by_theme/futurama or /by_theme/space, or /by_name/choi xoo ang

Now that I learned of TMSU, tagsistant and the like, I'm gonna try to make use of those.