am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
We’ve been played for absolute fools.
At my company we use M-Files, which is a document storage system that prides itself in not using folders. “No more searching for the file in thousands of folders”, they proclaim. It’s all a huge dump of files. To find files you need to tag them when checking them in. Later you search via these tags.
Guess what happens: All documents are either untagged or they’re tagged with wildly unhelpful tags. So in reality you can’t find shit. You can’t even make a sensible guess as to where a file might be and check the 3–5 folders that come to mind, because there are no folders.
M-Files is a black hole for information. No, scratch that. Even black holes radiate out the information they receive. M-Files doesn’t.
In my last company we used a system called windchill. Technically they had folders. Previously we used a different system. But when we switched to windchill no one had time to actually sort and organize the tens of thousands of documents. As a result everything just got dropped in the root folder.
To make it worse there was no enforced naming scheme… Plan for… Thing’s plan… Protocol for execution of thing… Ip of thing… Thing’s up… Protocol of thing… Plan of thing… All valid. And in 5 years when your 3rd replacement is trying to find it… Alcoholism is a serious disorder