Folder file structure

You open another drawer to find an old holiday costume. Your clothes are probably more organized than that, but your files might not be. In fact, 57 percent of U. Good news: You can save time and learn how to organize digital files with a few best practices. The key is to decide on a system, communicate it clearly to everyone in your organization, and be consistent.

Set goals for digital file organization. Organizing digital files can take over your life if you let it, so start by getting specific about what you want to accomplish. The office manager will start by spending one Friday afternoon on this, followed by an hour or so each week. Talk to the leadership team at your organization so you understand their priorities. If you have time, get input from everyone.

Here are a few questions to start with:. Organize digital files by name, date, project, or department. The best way to organize files on a computer will vary based on your organization and its needs. Decide whether it makes sense to organize files by name, date, project, or department. After that, shared drive folder structure best practice is to start with your broadest categories for your main folders, and then get more specific with subfolders. Pros: Names are less ambiguous than other categories, such as industry or product type.

Cons: It can be confusing if the client or company changes their name. It can be difficult to remember when you worked on a certain project at a glance. Best for: Organizations with large amounts of files tied to time periods, like a financial services business.

Best for: Organizations with lots of cross-departmental collaboration—for example, a project manager, writer, and graphic designer work together on every project. Cons: It can be hard to find related projects unless you include that in the file naming structure.

Pros: Each team knows where to find their files, so searching is faster. Cons: When departments do collaborate, it can be confusing deciding where to save files. Ideally, your file names should be detailed enough that you know exactly what they are at a glance. Start with the broadest category at the beginning of the file name, like the year or department, and then get more specific.

Whatever you decide, just be consistent. The time … you get the picture. If you, too, have files scattered across your hard drive or in the cloud, I hope some of these tips will help you. Reorganizing your digital files could take an afternoon or a week, depending on how many folders and files you have to sift through. I recommend doing this in sprints. Focus on one category of files at a time, such as your work documents or your photos.

Before you start attacking your files, take stock of what you have to organize, and visualize what an organized file system looks like to you. Think of the top-level folder as a drawer in a file cabinet. You might have one drawer for work, one for household, one for side projects. Then for individual files, where would you put them so you can quickly pull out a folder to retrieve them? Below those I have subfolders that get more specific by project. The best way to organize your documents may look different than mine, but the goal is to not have any stray files.

They should all be in folders. Think again about the file-cabinet analogy. It would be messy to have stray pieces of paper not in their appropriate folders, right? They will hopefully thank you for:. The time invested in learning how to organize your code now will help you streamline future projects and add consistency between projects. Even if you are working on a quick homework assignment, think about the hundreds of similar homework assignments for which you have to mock up a folder and then finagle some files we advise against putting everything on your desktop.

Being confused is never fun, especially when you are the cause of confusion. Going back to the code and forgetting where your files are placed, or worse, which files to use the deadly trial-and-error approach of using file1.

Even worse, it will limit the ability to reproduce your code. Therefore, establishing consistency at the beginning — which starts with a standard file structure and naming convention — will pay dividends for your future self. The goal is to thank your past self. As with writing an article or making a presentation, deciding how to deliver key information depends not only your personal goals, but also on the goals of your audience.

That being said, to establish a perspective for the sake of the below examples, we are going to assume you are a data scientist. We use a loose definition of a data scientist:. Those viewing your code, who may be data scientists, researchers, or those wanting to learn, may have other intentions, such as….

Finding the right time to deviate and be flexible in establishing a file structure is wiser than blindly adhering to ritual.

A relevant saying now popularized in the coding world is,. None of the practices we describe below are binding, or necessary to make good code. Rather, we try to articulate general principles for achieving consistent, maintainable file structure. There are also tradeoffs between the time to develop such file structures, and time to actually write and implement code. As Donald Knuth , one of the early leaders of good programming, has said,. There are some overarching ground rules to keep in mind before hacking away at your computer.

They are:. When writing code, it is a good design principle to separate program functionality into distinct sections, where each section addresses a separate concern e.

This is also true when breaking down your file structures: each folder should contain files with similar functionality or purposes. As you develop your project, scratch work will sprout up alongside your lab notebook. Scratch work is anything you do to transform, manipulate, or inspect plot, explore, analyze, etc.

Always put everything into scripts to ensure repeatability , even though it may seem quick and easy to do with command line arguments in the moment. By source code, we mean the finalized working code that is used to derive the results. Depending on the size and nature of your project, there may also be several single-use scripts for tasks such as converting, cleaning, plotting, and so on. Especially for larger projects, Makefiles will aid in tracking revisions in your code and data.

Google and Makefile templates are your friends. However, there are a few important base principles on which you can build your own. Every file, whether it be data or code, has a path including the filename at the end that tells the computer where to look for it. Folder names are, in general, are a single idea element.

Filenames, on the other hand, may be one or more ideas. There are three idea elements here:. For a more involved example using multiple idea abbreviations, see this case study by the Stanford Libraries. Should it be date, then location — or location, then date? That all depends on how you will be accessing the data.

In general, put the most important thing first , whether in a folder hierarchy or an individual filename. Individual filenames start mattering more for flatter file structures: e. If the project goal is to identify temporal variations in weather data, put the date first in the path sentence left-most, highest-level.

The last idea to be addressed is often the version number. Use a simple version sequence e. If someone handed you files like this, would you trust the conclusions? Would you feel they did a good job with the project? To prevent ideas from blurring together, some form of delimiter is needed. The OS already put slashes in between folder names for us, but what if we have multi-word ideas or multi-idea filenames?

Mixing delimiters can be a great strategy for improving readability.