Organising Your Content Archive Before It Becomes Unmanageable
After a year of production files are everywhere and nothing can be found. Half an hour of structure saves months of searching.
At the start files are somewhere and they can be found. After a year they're scattered across phones, storage services and folders with temporary names, and retrieving one photograph costs more than reshooting it. It's a problem you prevent in half an hour and never fully solve.
Two rules are enough
One folder per period, not per topic: topics change, dates don't. And a filename starting with the date in year-month-day form, so alphabetical order is also chronological.
What to keep and what not to
- The unmodified originals: the only thing that can't be recovered.
- The final published version, so you know what has already gone out.
- The materials used to make it, if they can't be recreated.
- Not the twenty intermediate versions: they take space and won't be needed.
The record of what has been published
A table with date, channel, topic and link. It prevents republishing the same thing, helps find a piece that worked, and supports reusing material in other formats. It's the most useful document and the first one nobody keeps.
Who needs access
At least two people. An archive living on one person's device isn't an archive: it's a risk with a year of work inside it.
A disorganised archive doesn't lose files: it makes you produce again what already existed.
Sources and Further Reading
Official documentation and guidelines cited or useful for going deeper.