Thank you for the brief overview of the situation.

A quick initial suggestion then: since it seems like your investigators
care a lot about their filenames, chances are they will also care about
sorting files by name, and maybe accessing them directly by typing the
first few letters of the name in Explorer. In order not to break these
behaviors, I would use a *postfix* timestamp or version number, rather
than a prefix one.

You will want to give great care to how you define your directory
structure, as it is something that may be difficult to change later on.
My initial impression is that using the date of upload is not a very
good idea: in order to navigate to a certain file, one would have to
remember when it was uploaded (and that may very well be  different
from the date of experiment), and that does not sound very practical...
Using uploader identity may work if the data is tightly tied to that
person. But it may not work too well if the data is produced by or
shared among a team. Having a dedicated team uploader may be a quick
fix, but it also has its own drawbacks (think: team uploader on sick
leave...)

Finally, going a bit beyond your requirements: from your description,
it sounds like each and every investigator has his/her own conventions
for naming files, that may make sense to them, but not necessarily to
anyone else. This may be acceptable in your environment, but it just
sounds like something that would hinder data sharing. It is standard
prodecure in most IT projects to start by defining coding standards and
naming conventions. This includes of course file naming. It may not be
practical in your situation, without a dedicated IT support team to
centralize the effort, but on the up side: if all uploads are going to
be done using the CMS frontend, you have the perfect choke point to
enforce naming rules.

Anyway, good luck with your effort. Let us know how things go.


Cheers,

--
Yves-Eric


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