Filenaming convention guidance

[Caveman]

Per subject... Network at work is a mess. I'm not an IT guy... I'm a mechanical engineer with a vision to "clean up" the network where my team stores files for various productes, etc...

Just looking for any tip/ideas on the best format for filenaming conventions, etc...

Once question I have is whether putting the date in filename is useful at all since the OS tags the file for the last time it was written to.

 

[Cerb]

1. Don't make deep folder structures! Long paths will bite you, at some point. Engineer types seem to love to do this.

2. Mtime is fragile, and does not always propagate upwards. Putting it in the name can be useful.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Date(time) in the file/folder name is useful, especially for sorting. YYYYMMDD(-hhmmss) format.

Don't use spaces.

 

[Kaido]

By vendor and then by project. On a larger scale, by department. Then let each department manager handle what's inside & make annual cleanouts a requirement. I also have some misc folders, like public user folders (for scans & temporarily sharing large files) & company document folders for forms, lunch mensu, etc.

Like Cerb said, avoid long file structures. This can kill you with zipping (like for emailing folder structures via zip or doing backups).

 

[Dahak]

1. Don't make deep folder structures! Long paths will bite you, at some point. Engineer types seem to love to do this.

Cant Stress this enough, I support an architecture firm and they have really long paths and it has causes issues
I can give a general layout on how they have theirs setup later if you are curious

 

[sm625]

It is like herding cats to even try.... The best you can do is at least make sure they're not wasting massive amounts of space. Have them all do a search of their stuff and list which files are using more than say 10MB.

Many design tools will create huge temporary files that can safely be deleted. I saved dozens of GB jsut by deleting useless pch files...

Also, get rid of duplicate files. I once found 17 copies of adobe reader installer.

 

[Mushkins]

Also, get rid of duplicate files. I once found 17 copies of adobe reader installer.

This.

Going through a document server cleanup right now. Dear god, how many copies of the *same file* do these people need? Then they all edit a different one and ask why their work disappeared. And you cant just delete them because one of them *might* be something someone needed even if it's from 2005 and hasnt been opened since that employee was canned in 2006...