See if you recognize this syndrome. There is a file you need to read. Maybe it has some important stuff in it. A contract that went through a bunch of revisions. That sort of thing. Only, when you go to the directory on your company samba share there are 30 files that it could be.

Inevitably at least 3 of these will have the word final somewhere in their filename. Maybe it has even been written in capital letters to impart a sense of utter irreversibility. Twice.

This is crazy. While there may be some reason to keep hold of different versions of documents, naming them in a deliberately obfuscationary manner is inexcusable.

Of course, there really isn’t a need to keep multiple versions. We have had Wikis since the mid-90s and version control has been around for more than 40 years.

But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that there is some reason why they need to be kept.

How about a number in the filename? If you start at 000 you can get a thousand versions that will be in sorted order when you open your folder.

Or how about using the ISO-8601 date, perhaps with a number if there is likely to be more than one version a day. Like this: 2015-01-15-001. Again, the files will all be in order. And the last version of the file will be, ummm, the one that is last in the directory listing.

Rather than wasting time naming files badly, I encourage you all to adopt a naming convention that is sane, consistent and easy. Not arbitrary, confused and difficult.