Back in late August, one of my stated goals was to "organize electronic files."
I'm at least halfway through cleaning up all the files on my hard drive now; all the non-physics stuff has been organized. During this process, I have been thinking about a good file naming convention. There were some suggestions I found on a previous post.
For articles, I try to use the convention author_name-article_title-publication_name-year. If the title is vague or unhelpful, I'll rename it. I prefer using dashes as opposed to underscores because they are easier to read and because they are easier to type (no shift key).
I also tend to create a lot of folders. The folder names can be quite descriptive and serve as a poor alternative to tagging. I'm trying a nested file directory structure. For instance, I use a small number of super-folders called "culture", "work", "computing", "lifehacking", etc. Each of these super-folders contains more directories.
Folders and long file names seem a bit archaic and tedious, but at least you can count on them being robust and dependable for years to come. Also, they are OS-independent which is nice if you use more than one OS.
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