How do you organize your files? and what do you suggest?

I use this method, both for clients and my personal stuff:

/projects

   /company (or persons name)
 
       /project name
 
             /contracts
 
            /created
 
                 /documents
 
                 /design
 
            /dev
 
            /presentations
 
            /proposals
 
            /supplied
 

I also have a similar structure starting with products (for internal products) instead of projects etc. Otherwise it is nearly identical. Almost ever sub dir has documents and design as sub dirs too. Contracts have the MSA and each SOW by title and year + month.

I used to put year under projects/products. The problem is that it becomes harder to find things over time (especially for 1 client) and honestly I archive the company's I haven't done business with in over 12 months, so it was fairly stupid to have year for me. We store this structure on box too so that we can easily collaborate, we just don't store /dev in box.

Things under dev are all in git so they are version controlled.

It isn't perfect for everything but so far it works better than any other I have tried/used so far. Hell even my personal real estate projects get put under this structure. And it allows for easy collaboration etc. Always open to feedback myself.

I organize a lot of my of files by date actually. Pictures and other miscellaneous stuff. Music files are organized by artist and album. And project files are organized by project name.

I have been working on an new way to organize my files but I haven't had the time to really do it. The idea is to have a tag/ directory and hard link files into sub-directories named for the tag/labels they represent.

I have 3 main folders for work related stuff: Work in progress, Archive, For Later. Work In Progress is all the small stuff that has to be done in less than a month and it´s sync with dropbox, while the archive is all the past stuff that´s done and sync with Amazon cold storage. For Later is where I save the ideas and things that i want to test or try. The inside structure of each is quite different. On the Archive I have it by client/company name, friend name or family name (sisters, dad, me, etc) and in the Work In Progress I keep it by project name, since there can be several things going on with one client. And the For Later I keep it by idea/topic. It's taken me 10 years to get to this system but it fits my workflow, I do not know if that's the best for you

~/tmp # Any files that may not want to keep for long. May delete at any time

~/Documents # Inbox of new documents

~/Documents/[Organization]

~/Documents/[Organization]/[catalog]

~/Documents/archive # Closed projects, Organization not involved any more.

~/Documents/archive/[year]

~/Documents/Personal/[catalog]