I am going to be reorganizing a computer filing system for a friend. She basically has chaos as she has a few drives with home and work files, plus her deceased mother’s files to organize. This will be on a Mac system. I don’t think it’s an extraordinary number of files, maybe 20-30k possibly less.

My approach will be to first sort by media type (get photos and video separated), then to order by date and sort into broad categories, probably by file type. There will be a lot of .doc and .xls stuff. I’m not sure how much is already in project folders vs loose. But the final detailing will be her task — my job will be to set up a structure and group similar things together. I will use smart folders to do this (preserving whatever structure exists).

I’m thinking that I should append an ISO date to the beginning of all file names. I’m looking for an easy way to do this- I’m not a programmer and would prefer to not use the terminal. Anyone know of a good tool?

Then the big question… what file structure? I’m thinking J.D because it will impose structure in an understandable way, and most decisions can be made up front. It should be compatible with organizing by date, and eliminate the ambiguity inherent in descriptive naming. I’m prepared to alter it some if necessary, or create separate structures for home and work. I’m aware that it’s less flexible than others, but that may be a strength in this case. Thoughts?