5.02 File / Folder / Volume Name Conventions

1.       Tilde or otherwise truncated file or folder names. As example, AAA0000001.TIF versus AAA000~1.TIF and D:\PROGRAM FILES\ versus D:\PROGRA~1\. Whenever possible, volume, file and folder names should not be wider than eight (8) characters with a suffix not wider than three (3) characters. In technical circles, this is known as the “16-bit” or “MS-DOS 8.3” naming convention.

2.       Use of spaces or any characters in a load file that Windows does not allow in a file or folder name. This seems obvious, but we have received deliveries from vendors who used characters in the database that were not valid in the filename. This resulted in files that would either not copy to the server or would copy with strange naming results. We don’t know what kind of software or operating system this vendor used to create their product, but they certainly never tried to load it themselves.

3.       I will not name the vendor, but on several separate projects they used VENDOR001 as the volume name. If used, my server could have a dozen VENDOR001 CDs. If the filenames do not have the full image key, e.g. “0000001.TIF”, there is no quick way to determine the associated database, client or matter.

4.       Missing or empty folders are a big red flag. If your image folder contains 3 subfolders named 012, 014 and 015, your first inclination is to ask what happened to 001-011 and 013. This just isn’t right on any level. It leads me to assume there will be problems with the data, specifically missing images.