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I run several servers (Win Svr 2k3 & Ubuntu) at home and have quite a few files now stored on various shares. I often find, when organizing files into directories, that there really isn't just one folder where it makes sense to put something. What seems to be the perfect solution for this problem is a web-based interface that allows tagging and searching (similar to gmail's mail tagging system)

Does anyone know of a web-based file management system that would allow me to "tag" files and, subsequently, browse and search these tags? I'm not looking for anything extremely fancy and platform isn't a major issue either.

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To clarify, the reason that I mentioned web-based is to provide an interface to remote clients. Since the files being accessed are on network shares, the tagging (or at least browsing) must be functional from non-local machines. Any alternative method that would meed this requirement would certainly be viable. Ideally the solution would also be scalable to a "large" amount of data (300GB+). – Jeffrey P Nov 6 '10 at 2:47

migrated from superuser.com Nov 5 '10 at 8:04

3 Answers

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Look at Google Docs. You can create a normal folder structure on it, but can include a file in multiple directories by using "Organize". It will show up in all the directories you check off.

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That is essentially the functionality I want, but something I can run locally on my own machines. The amount of data I have to classify is far to much to consider uploading it to Google Docs. (Unless I am misunderstanding what you are suggesting.) – Jeffrey P Nov 6 '10 at 2:28
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It's not web-based but perhaps "Virtual Folders" would help?

See the Windows section of the Wikipedia article.

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The behavior of Win7's virtual folders is pretty close to the behavior I want (albeit, without a convenient centralized interface), but it seems to be only applicable on the local machine. Also, I'm not sure how this would extend to file shares accessed by other machines (does it?). I still think this solution would help a lot of people with similar problems. – Jeffrey P Nov 6 '10 at 2:38
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I'm assuming that when you asked about web-based, that it was just because that's what you've seen done for tagging. If your requirements aren't necessarily that it be web based, you could sort of accomplish what you describe in Windows using shortcuts - stick all your files into a storage folder (or folders) and put a shortcut to it in each folder where you might want to see the file. This would have the added benefit of being browsable in the normal sense.

You can implement this solution inside of Internet Explorer if you like, by tagging files as Favorites - shortcuts are created inside C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Favorites.

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I think this idea is interesting and I definitely didn't consider it, but I don't think it would scale well to large amount of data with a large amount of tags. – Jeffrey P Nov 6 '10 at 2:31

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