discussion 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.

And I set up mirrors, which is another endless option

 

[Ignis344]

As a broke data hoarder I usually download and keep as much games as I have and organize them by folders and shortcuts but when I inevitably run out of storage I just delete the game where I know I will find easily on the internet and also backlog really organise games I played or playing to show off to friends easily

 

[xarenic]

As a hoarder with ADHD, scattered across multiple drives, hopefully I can remember which subfolder of a subfolder of which drive the game I want to play is on

 

[WaXan0r10]

Artist Name > Game Name > Game Compressed, and whatever else like mods and patches
then in a separate folder
Artist name > Game name > Game Uncompressed, delete when done and move save to compressed folder

and I just found out about apps like XLibrary and Atlas on here so I've been adding my games to those

interesting to see how other people do theirs

 

[xrdctfvygbuh]

I just have one big folder with every game I download and decide are worth keeping. Some of them don't even have the games name and there's no indication what it is. I have over 300 games like that. Not unnamed, that's a smaller majority I'm not gonna count.

 

[JillianV]

For Steam I have a handful of collections for either series or genre. For example all Resident Evil games are in one collection, Final Fantasy in another, metroidvania has its own collection etc. There's still a bunch of games that are not sorted but they're usually one of a kind almost.
For emulators I basically have "games -> PS1 -> Roms -> game folder". I still have some old emulators that are on the same level as the roms, but haven't bothered to delete.
As for the games from this site I have a "spicy games -> author -> game folder" structure.

 

[dangerbeach]

I DL, play to finish, then delete. Only a couple games I've ever played twice lol.