ruby_bell47•9d agoProlific Poster

Vent: the "save as you go" habit that backfired on a tight deadline

I used to save every single revision as a new file. "draft1", "draft2", "final", "final_REAL", you name it. Last week I had a client change the deadline from Friday to Tuesday morning and I spent 45 minutes just figuring out which file was the actual latest version. Turns out I had 23 versions of the same project. Now I just use one file with a date stamp in the filename, like "project-2024-11-05". Has anyone else lost time just sorting through old versions?

3 comments

3 Comments

shane_morgan9d ago

Ngl my buddy had 47 versions of one file and just rage-deleted the whole folder and started over.

mason.drew9d ago

Double down on the date stamp idea and add a version number to it. Like "project-2024-11-05-v2" so you can see both the date and how many times you actually revised it that day. I started doing this after a similar mess and it saves so much time when you need to backtrack.

-1

colegarcia9d ago

Yeah, that's a good system. I'd add that you might want to drop the "v" and just use a hyphen and a number, makes it cleaner when you're scrolling through a list of files.