After having to work with many electronic files during my years in the IB, I developed my own file organization method.

Naming

Make It Meaningful

Give your files meaningful names. It’s very likely that you need to revise your essay draft multiple times, so you can’t really tell which draft is the final one until you get close to submission. So don’t just call it final, and then the revised version real final, and real final final, etc.

I’ve done that. That’s really funny, but that’s not helpful for identifying the content of each file.

Instead, try something like:

• draft 1,
• draft with conclusion modified,
• or draft with neat formatting.

Sometimes the changes are hard to summarize, so I use things that happen to me while I’m working on the file to name it. For example, draft after history test. In this way, the name helps me remember the day I have worked on the file as well as the content I have edited.

When the two naming methods above don’t work, I name the file using the time I finish the draft. The “last modified date” in operating systems gets renewed every time even when there’s only one slightest change in the file, but I only want to track the major changes. So, I record the time on my own, like

• draft on monday evening
• notes at late sunday night

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides can basically do these for you with the function for tracking changes. You can also very conveniently name the history versions. But I believe there’re people out there who sometimes just don’t want to work with those editing tools.

Meaningful names can be very helpful when you search for files.

“Perfection”?

I’m a perfectionist, so I had been naming files and folders with my best consistency and my best attention to capitalization and spaces or underscores between words, before I realized that naming files “perfectly” wastes loads of time. Pressing “Shift” at the start of almost every single word can be more tiring and time-consuming than one thinks.

Now, I name files with lowercase letters, and sometimes, I use hyphens to replace underscores and spaces:

• An Example File Name.doc
• an-example-file-name.doc

The former makes sense—typing lowercase is easier. There are several reasons to the latter one.

I hate escaping every single space in terminal or command prompt, or whatever you call it. Well, technically you can also "type the file name within parenthesis just like this.txt". This is more about one’s personal preference. But when it comes to putting files onto the web, like what I do here on my blog, hyphens are helpful because they work perfectly in URLs.

With Chinese file names, it’s so much easier. I just smash everything together and use a hyphen whenever I need to separate the characters. Because of the shapes of characters, any numbers and Latin alphabet letters can stand out clearly from Chinese characters, which is very convenient when I look for files by the file names. Some real examples are:

• 2020-05-11P1答卷小说-捅马蜂窝.pdf
• 毕业典礼全过程（我的片段带字幕）压缩版.mp4

Structuring Info

Have a consistent structure for the file names, and order the parts of a file name to help you look for specific files.

For example, I had a lot of files for data processing when I did my physics EE experiment. I had 7 different materials to work with (so 7 data points), each with 3 trials, and each trial included 2 types of measurements, each in a different file. So I named them like this:

• Sandpaper Trial 1 - Angle
• Sandpaper Trial 1 - Length
• Sandpaper Trial 2 - Angle
• Sandpaper Trial 2 - Length
• Sandpaper Trial 3 - Angle
• Sandpaper Trial 3 - Length
• Rubber Trial 1 - Angle
• Rubber Trial 1 - Length
• …

The order of information is the same: material, trial, and measurement. The order can also help categorize the files so that I can search from a wide range and narrow down to a file, which is next to other similar files that I might want to look at at the same time.

Make sure your file name can really be ordered to help you though. Names that start with dates like “29 Jan 2021” and “17 Feb 2021” are less helpful than those with “2021-01-19” and “2021-02-17”. Because the former format can be ordered like a mess:

• 1 June 2021.txt
• 6 Dec 2020.txt
• 17 Feb 2021.txt
• 29 Jan 2021.txt

Make It Short

Keep the names as short as possible, but make sure you don’t forget what your abbreviations mean. In this way, you can scan through your folders faster and find the file you want faster.

So instead of something like this:

• physics ia presearch - pendulum experiment trial 1 video
• physics ia presearch - pendulum research paper a real pendulum vs simple pendulum
• physics ia - pendulum worksheet with experiment design draft

You might want to try this:

• trial 1 vid
• real vs simple pendulum
• experiment design

This is much less overwhelming and much easier for humans to read.

Hotkeys

Helpful to know the hotkeys for:

• Copy & Paste
• Multi-select (with Shift or Ctrl)
• Rename
• Delete
• Jump to start / end / next word / next paragraph
• Jump to file by the first letter in its name
• Close current window (Ctrl / Cmd + w)
• Open new folder / finder window (Ctrl / Cmd + n)

After working a lot with electronic files, I slowly realized that anything task that can be completed using a keyboard can go much faster than things that you have to do using a mouse.

You only have one mouse and one cursor to go around the whole screen, but you have 10 fingers (that’s 10 times more!) that can stretch across the whole keyboard, which is usually no larger than your screen.

Views

Depending on the purpose, different views of files in folders / finder can have different effects.

List view is helpful when you search by file name or when there’re a lot of files.

Icon view is helpful for searching among images.

Drop-down lists are helpful when you need to search among the subfolders of multiple folders.

I also find it helpful to see the file extensions. So it’s much easier for me to distinguish between different files with similar names, especially the editable versions and the exported “locked” versions. So instead of

• 2021-03-10 Homework
• 2021-03-10 Homework,

with the file types shown in a different column in the folder / finder window, I have

• 2021-03-10 Homework.pages
• 2021-03-10 Homework.pdf.

There’re probably more to explore depending on your file viewer.

Automation

For MacOS users, Automator is a great helper for many repetitive tasks. It can bulk copy files, resize pictures, combine PDFs, rename files, replace parts of file names with a given string, just to name a few.

If you know programming, you can even do more with apple scripts (in Automator), python, etc. It’s not complicated at all. Even just a GUI automation package for python can do a lot for you, but that’s really brute forcing things haha.

For Windows, an equivalent software is AutoHotkey, although the lack of a graphical UI might make it a bit more intimidating than the “drag and drop” interface in Automator. I haven’t used it, so can’t say much.

What are computers for? What are they good at? Repetitive tasks! So let them do the job for you.

Backup

Doing backups is easy. Don’t risk losing your files. Simply weigh up the risks and effort required from you, and it should be clear which choice is better. Although the risk of losing files seems low, but once it happens, barely anything can save you.

My Story

This is just a personal story. Last week, my laptop got stuck in the system update process, and it turned out that the only way to make it work was to clear the whole storage. What’s in there? All my coursework, electronic notes, research resources, pictures, videos, browser bookmarks, diary, blog post drafts, etc.

Luckily, I used to copy my important files onto an external hard drive from time to time, and I did that again before the system update. So what got lost was the unimportant ones, although I still put a lot of time into creating them and organizing them in nice folders.

Not only can you lose the personal documents, but also the personalization settings, tools, etc. For example, I lost the handy tools I wrote with python and bash. I lost the personalized hotkeys. I also lost the plug-ins I added bits by bits to chrome, atom and typora.

That’s the lesson. Do backups regularly, and do complete backups. But how?

Some Advice

Copying files onto an external hard drive, like what I did, is the most basic form of creating backups. However, I’ve learnt some rules from here and there, which seem quite convincing to me. An idea is the 3-2-1 backup rule. Of course, there’re other more advanced methods.

In short, the 3-2-1 backup rule is that you need to have multiple copies in multiple places (geographical location) and in multiple forms of storage.

For example, I have my IB DP Chinese paper 1 practice locally on my laptop, on my external hard drive, online in my Google Drive, and as hard copies at home. Unfortunately, I haven’t kept all my files in this way before I attempted to update my laptop.

These copies can virtually guarantee the safety of these files, even when, for example, an earthquake happens near my house and destroys everything. Or when something¹ like in Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning happens in real life 😂

Another idea is to work, as often as possible, with cloud service, and download your files regularly to keep a local copy of everything. Like Google Drive, MS OneDrive, GitHub, etc.

Time machine and iCloud are useful for MacOS.

And always be careful and remember to do a backup before you make any major changes to your laptop, or any electronic device. They are not as reliable as they seem.

I agree with it when people say that the more simple a storage media is, the more it is controllable by you. Controllable in the sense that your data can be preserved as you wish, and in the sense that your data is exposed to others as you wish. A bit off the topic, but this is exactly one of the reasons why I’m still keeping a physical diary book.

What’s Next

These are the helpful tips as far as I know now. You’re welcome to share your experience and tips in the comment section, and you can also find contact info under the “About” section of this blog.

In the “Backups” section, I talked about having copies in different forms of storage, which include hard copies on paper. So, I’m planning to talk about organizing physical files in next week’s update, more or less with an emphasis on my experience as a student. Stay tuned!