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Best Practices

• Archiving & Preservation
• Citing Data
• Data Repositories
• Data Storage & Backup
• Defining Research Data
• File Formats
• File Naming & Tracking Changes
• Funding Agency Guidelines
• Human Subjects Data
• Intellectual Property
• Laboratory Notebooks
• Metadata & Data Documentation
• Sharing Data

File Naming & Tracking Changes (Version Control)

On this page: File naming | Tracking changes with version control

File Naming

Best Practices:

1. Be consistent.

• Have conventions for naming (1) Directory structure, (2) Folder names, (3) File names
• Always include the same information (eg. date and time)
• Retain the order of information (eg. YYYYMMDD, not MMDDYYY )

2. Be descriptive so others can understand your meaning.

Try to keep file and folder names under 32 characters

Within reason, Include relevant information such as:

• Unique identifier (ie. Project Name or Grant # in folder name)
• Project or research data name
• Conditions (Lab instrument, Solvent, Temperature, etc.)
• Run of experiment (sequential)
• Date (in file properties too)
• Use application-specific codes in 3-letter file extension and lowercase: mov, tif, wrl
• When using sequential numbering, make sure to use leading zeros to allow for multi-digit versions. For example, a sequence of 1-10 should be numbered 01-10; a sequence of 1-100 should be numbered 001-010-100.
• No special characters: & , * % # ; * ( ) ! @$ ^ ~ ' { } [ ] ? < > -
• Use only one period and before the file extension (e.g. name_paper.doc
  NOT name.paper.doc OR name_paper..doc)

example: Project_instrument_location_YYYYMMDD[hh][mm][ss][_extra].ext

File renaming Applications: If you have many files already named, use a file renaming application such as ReNamer (Mac/Windows/Unix)

Tracking Changes with Version Control

Keep track of versions of files (version control):

Manually: Use a sequential numbered system: v01, v02

• Don't use confusing labels, such as 'revision', 'final', 'final2', etc.

OR:

Use version control software (SVN) such as Mercurial, or TortoiseSVN, which can track revisions to files and help you roll back to a previous version of a file.