Best Practices for File Management
- Megan Winterburn
When storing data it is important to consider the names, structure and relationships of your files.
Naming Files
File names should be descriptive, meaningful, and unique. It is also best to avoid using special characters (e.g. ~, !, @, #, $, %) and spaces.
Consider an example, a file containing lab data for a research study named data.csv.
This name is generic and uninformative. A better name would include things such as the name of the project, experiment or investigator, the date or version number of the file, and a description of the file contents. An example of a more descriptive name is examplestudy_participant01-version01.csv, where examplestudy is the name of the study, participant01 is the ID number for this specific participant and version01 is the version of this file. All other data from this experiment would be named following this pattern, making it clear to anyone within or outside the project what these files contain without opening them.
Name Length
While it is important for file names to be descriptive, they must also be concise. The maximum length of a file path and name in Windows is ~256 characters.
A file path is like the directions to get to a file. For example, if the file called data.csv is stored in a subfolder called data in a folder called project on the C drive of the computer the file path would be C:\project\data\data.csv. So this file path is 24 characters.
You may be able to save files with longer file paths/names but this can cause issues when accessing them later. File Explorer will generally show these files as “\\?”
Ensure you consider the length of the file path when choosing a name to avoid this issue.
If you already have files with this problem check out this article for how to fix them: https://it.cornell.edu/shared-file/windows-file-name-or-destination-path-you-specified-not-valid-or-too-long
Structuring Files
Files should be stored in appropriately named folders to make locating a file easy.
You should have a main folder with the name of the study and then subfolders within for specific data and participants. Here is one method of organization for a research project,
You should organize files for all purposes in a similar manner to make finding what you need easy and efficient.
Adapted from: