Question

My question is, is it a bad idea to store multiple videos in one folder?

I have created a video uploader script, but it doesn’t save each video in a seperate folder, it saves all of them in one folder (each with a different hashed video name).

- videos folder
    - e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577
    - 35d91262b3c3ec8841b54169588c97f7
    - cc273fe9d442850fa18c31c88c823e07

Is this a bad idea? Could this lead to any problems? What are the pros and cons of this?

Answer 1

Yes this IS a problem once you have few thousands files in that directory. Some operating systems choke when there are that many files in one folder.

I also remember one case where a FTP server refused to show more than 4000 files in a directory listing.

One solution is to organize your files like this:

- videos folder
 - e
  - e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577
 - 3
  - 35d91262b3c3ec8841b54169588c97f7
 - c
  - cc273fe9d442850fa18c31c88c823e07

This gives you max 16 folders below videos folder. If you still end up with too many files in the sub-directory then use another level:

- videos folder
 - e
  - e0
   - e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577
 - 3
  - 35
   - 35d91262b3c3ec8841b54169588c97f7
 - c
  - cc
   - cc273fe9d442850fa18c31c88c823e07