We’ve all been there, making a final version of our paper, re-read it ourselves or sent it to someone else to read, and then mistakes are found, so you make another file and change the ending of the file name to _final2, or added another _final onto the previous final. 

Avoid this file organization pitfall and use naming conventions like _v for version or _rc for release candidate. If you have another letter that can help you, use that too, you could have _d for draft, or _o for ontwerp. 

After whichever letter you choose, use numbers to denote which version the file is. Also helpful with version numbers is to use a leading zero (sometimes called left-padding) for values under 10, if you make it to 10 or more versions of a file, when sorting you might find the file names are out of order (v1, v10, v11, v2, v20, v3, v4, v5)

• First version: ResearchReport_v01.docx
• Second version: ResearchReport_v02.docx
• Ninety-nineth version: ResearchReport_v99.docx

You could decide on making a distinction between major and minor version changes in the version numbering. If you have agreed with your collaborators to include this distinction, please use ordinal numbers (including leading zeros) for major changes and a letter for minor changes. A letter is in favor of a decimal number to indicate minor changes, because decimal breaks good file naming conventions.

It is recommended to use capital letters or underscores between two words instead of special characters such as (semi-)colons (; & :), pound (#), percent (%), ampersand(&), slash (\ or /), curly brackets ({ or }), asterisk (*), quotes (“ or ‘), dollar sign ($), blank spaces ( ), angle brackets ( < or >), question or exclamation marks (? or !), plus or equal sign (+ or =), pipe(|), commas (,), or periods (.). For example:

Special characters are not always valid on all filesystems, and your files could be shared on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, Linux, maybe even FreeBSD or TempleOS.

Dates in Filenames 

On a similar note, to using version numbers in file names, order dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format. Using this format, the dates in your file names will always be sorted in chronological order. 

See the following table where the same dates are all sorted but using different conventions of writing dates.

As you can see the dates in the left column are in chronological order, where the dates in the middle and right column are not ordered at all.

If it turns out that you create multiple versions on a single day, it is not ideal to include dates as version identifiers with your files.

Read More

• notFinal.doc – PhDComics
• Data Sharing and Management Snafu in 3 Short Acts – YouTube
• How to Name Files – jennybc on github.com