I Am Unorganized. Help!

I've always considered myself a fairly organized person but I have to admit I have a problem.

Recently my digital media files have started to mount up and mount up. Everything from family photos taken with my digital cameras, to mp3s to games to videos (not to mention all the files and media I have on CDs).

I'll be buying an external hard drive for storage (I've found a nice drive that holds a terabyte). I need to find some type of arching system that I can finally bring all my media under one banner. I'm thinking of calling my local library and see how they do it but I was wondering if anyone knows any uniformed systems that have been developed?

Here are the things I'm needing help with:

1) File Naming: I have several files that begin with the word "The." I've ran into issues with this where I can't find something just because the files are named improperly. I've seen some people put the word at the end (IE: ,the). There are also other examples of using the symbol & instead of the word. Or using a - instead of the word and so on.

2) Numbering: I've seen some people use a typical 1 and others use 01.

3) Categorizing: Knowing what media goes into what folders (IE: some king of uniformed hierarchy system).

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

I can give you the first step

Create, use, or rename a file for each type of media ie, music, games, pictures etc
keep your file name specific to its contents. Perform a search for files but in the file name search only for file by type for example type *.wma for your music this will pull up all the music you downloaded then move them into the file folder location you created; continue this with all of your other personal files.

The next step is creating sub files in each of these locations lets say for example your pictures folder you may want to create a vacation, holiday, birthday or something else. Only you will know this better draft up and outline then create your sub folders and move your files again. Because your sub folders are in your main folder you wont have to do the search just work from your drive/folder location. Teadious I know

NOTE: Whatever you decide keep it simple and keep a file folder directory of the locations of each type of media file taped on your desk for future reference when downloading new stuff.