How do you store and organize your games?

[vsg]

I just have a Games folder with everything inside, and delete them when I'm done.

 

[Matm95]

A lot of "loot goblins" on here. Especially considering that these piracy sites are basically free storage.

 

[Ethanol1]

I just have a Games folder with everything inside, and delete them when I'm done.

Same here for most of my games, though I have dedicated folders reserved for porn games and emulators

 

[frierenlover]

I approach storage with a "Data Hoarder" mindset. Since space is limited and I don't trust the internet to preserve media forever, I built a highly automated, self-hosted ecosystem to scrape, compress, and stream my collection. Here is how I manage it:

• Unified File System (fuse.mergerfs): I pool all my available drives (old HDDs, standard SSDs, and fast NVMes) into a single massive virtual drive. Everything is strictly categorized into specific root folders (e.g., Games, 2D Art, 3D Animations). I run a custom background auditor that constantly syncs the directory skeletons across the physical drives to prevent cross-disk errors.
• Game Archiving & Repacking: I don't leave every game unpacked. For games I want to keep, I back up the save files and run a custom shell script. This script scrubs the game folder of junk (shortcuts, web links, trackers) and ultra-compresses it using LZMA2 (utilizing either RAM or my SSD depending on the file size). This easily reduces game sizes by over 50%.
• Extreme Media Optimization: To save space, I wrote a custom suite that scans my directories for duplicate files using both exact hashing and visual AI fingerprints. It also automatically re-encodes large videos and GIFs using GPU hardware acceleration (NVENC), drastically shrinking file sizes without noticeable quality loss.
• Web Scraping: I have Python bots that scrape my favorite media sites, building local JSON databases and downloading images/videos in parallel so I have full offline mirrors of the content.
• Personal Streaming App: To comfortably consume all this media, I built my own Node.js web application—essentially my personal "Crunchyroll/Netflix". It features an offline manga reader, image gallery viewers, and a video player that uses FFmpeg to transcode heavy or unsupported files (like MKVs) on the fly. It even has a built-in Tier List system to rank my favorite shows.
• Paranoid Cloud Backup: Hard drives eventually fail, so I use various cloud services where I hold over 10TB of free space. However, my rule is strict: Zero-Sharing and Full Encryption. Every game or media batch uploaded is packed in .7z and heavily password-protected. I never generate share links, which keeps me completely off the radar of Big Tech moderation algorithms.

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And I set up mirrors, which is another endless option