Phaim (fāme) — Larry Becker’s Blog

A Cool Per-Client Filing System

Posted on 27 January 2010

Let’s say you’re a photographer or designer and you’re done working with a client on a particular job. It’s time to clear off your internal, working hard drive to free up working space, and save your important client files to an archive for possible future access. Most people would save those files to a hard drive and organize the files according to a particular filing system. And lots of those same people would have that hard drive mounted in one of those toaster configurations. And when the drive gets full, they’d just eject it and store it someplace safe. If that’s what you do, great!

But there’s another option I heard about a few years back and it’s actually a pretty practical way to handle client files if your typical collection of client files is under 16gigs. Put all your client files on an appropriately sized thumb drive and put it in a file folder with all of that client’s related paperwork. Those little thumb drives can be purchased for next to nothing in 2, 4, 8, and 16 gig configurations. And I’m not talking about some off brand stick. I’m talking about SanDisk Cruzers. These things are only about a buck per gig at places like Buy.com. Then the 32 gig drives are a bit more, but you could always use a couple drives.

On a cost per gigabyte scale, hard drive space is far cheaper and it holds much more data. But if a hard drive crashes, it loses far more data.

I know this solution isn’t for everyone, but it is a solid working system for lots of small businesses and it makes keeping track of individual files quite easy.

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