‘notfinal.doc’ by Jorge Cham from http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1531

When naming your files, consider these best practices:

1) Keep it short

2) Make it descriptive of what the file actually contains, understandable both to you and someone else (your professor doesn't want to receive 22 files all called "MyPaper.doc")

3) Have a plan for version control (number? date? "working copy" vs "first draft" vs "final draft"?)

When saving your documents, it's helpful to have a system so that you can quickly and efficiently find what you need later...you never know when you might need something again! Consider these best practices:

1) Make folders according to how you might need to find things later (by semester, then by class, then by project, for example)...

2) ...but don't go overboard! It's not helpful to make a super complex system that you stop using by week 3 because it's too much work :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore

Back up your work! Bad things happen to good data all the time, and you never know when it could happen to you. Consider these best practices:

1) The very best practice is to follow the rule of "here, near, and far" by having a local copy that you're working on (like on your laptop), a nearby backup (like on a USB flash drive), and an offsite copy (like in cloud storage such as Google Drive or dropbox).

2) Backups only work if they're done regularly...it's useless to have a backup that's so out of date it can't recover your recent work. Whether it's once a day, once a week, or once an hour while you're actively working on a paper, be sure to save your work often!