Practical
How to Keep Your Own Videos Organised
A file naming and folder approach that survives years of footage, and a backup rule that has outlasted every storage medium it was written for.
2 min read · Published 15 August 2026
Video collections get out of hand faster than any other kind of file, because the files are large, they arrive from several devices at once, and the default names are meaningless. A folder of two hundred files called VID_20240712_143022.mp4 contains everything you own and tells you nothing.
Dates first
Start every folder and file name with the date written year first: 2026-08-15. This one habit does most of the work, because it sorts chronologically on its own in every file manager, on every operating system, forever. Day-first and month-first formats sort into nonsense and are ambiguous between countries.
A workable pattern is date, then a short subject, then a detail if needed. 2026-08-15-harbour-sunset-wide.mp4 tells you what it is at a glance and sits in the right place automatically.
Three folders, not thirty
Elaborate folder trees collapse under their own weight because nobody maintains them. Three states are usually enough:
- Originals: untouched camera and phone files. Never edited, never overwritten, never deleted to save space.
- Working: project files and exports in progress. Expected to be messy, cleared out when a project is finished.
- Published: the final versions you actually released or sent, one per thing.
The important line is the first one. Originals are the only irreplaceable files you have. Everything else can be made again from them.
The 3-2-1 rule
Three copies of anything you care about, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else. It was written for tape and it still works, because the failures it protects against have not changed: a drive dies, a device is stolen, a folder is deleted by accident, a room floods.
A second copy in a different folder on the same drive is not a backup. Neither is a copy on a drive that lives permanently plugged into the same computer, if what you are worried about is theft, fire or a mistake that propagates.
Storage reality
Video is heavy. An hour of 1080p at a moderate bitrate is a few gigabytes; the same hour in 4K can be four times that; camera footage in a professional codec can be an order of magnitude more again. The file size calculator on this site will tell you what an hour of any given setting costs, which is a useful thing to know before deciding what to keep.
Compressing originals to save space is a decision you cannot undo. If space is genuinely short, it is better to be selective about what you keep at full quality than to degrade everything.
Check the backups occasionally
An untested backup is a hope. Once or twice a year, restore something at random and open it. Silent failures are common: a sync that stopped months ago, a drive that has been failing quietly, an archive that was never actually complete.
Common questions
Should I keep the original camera files?
Yes, for anything you would be upset to lose. They are the only copies with all the detail, and every export can be regenerated from them. Exports cannot regenerate an original.
Is cloud storage enough on its own?
It is a good off-site copy and a poor only copy. Accounts can be locked, services close, and a file deleted locally can propagate to the cloud before you notice. Keep a local copy as well.
How should I name files?
Date first in year-month-day form, then a short description, using hyphens rather than spaces. It sorts correctly everywhere and stays readable in a URL or a command line.