Making your file names descriptive and standardized will make them easy to understand later. Choose a file naming convention, detail it in a readme.txt file, and stick with it. Consider including:

• Project name or acronym
• Location or spatial coordinates
• Researcher name or initials
• Date or date range
• Type of data 
• Version number

Keep in mind that files likely will be moved from their original location when they are copied, emailed or re-located. Therefore, it is important that the file name include information independent of the folder or other file storage location information. A good file naming convention has the level of detail necessary to distinguish files from each other as well as to group like files together.  

These are some best practices to follow when it comes to developing your file naming system:

• Keep file names short, since long file names do not work well with all software and can cause backup problems
• Do not use spaces
  • To separate the elements in your file name use underscores and dashes 
    • project_experiment-1_health-feature_sharon-sadvari
  • You can also use Camel Case to separate the elements in your file name
    • ProjectExperiment1HealthFeatureSharonSadvari
  • Or a combination of the two
    • Project_Experiment1_HealthFeature_SharonSadvari
• If you have sequential numbers in your file name use leading zeroes so that they will sort appropriately
  •  001, 002, 003, …010, 011, 013, …100, 101, 102
• For dates, use the international standard YYYYMMDD
  • 20171208 or 2017-12-08
• For time, use military time HHMMSS with the time zone indicated by the appropriate abbreviation
  • 142317EST or 14-23-17-EST
• Do NOT include special characters such as ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ` ; ? , [ ] { } ‘ “