I’m instituting a new policy for the new year, and I wanted to share in case it’ll be helpful for anyone else:

As is my usual procedure, each day I work on a writing project, I save a different draft.  This includes changing the file name to include the date, so I know what the latest draft is, in MonthDayYear format (I also don’t lose any changes between drafts this way).  For example, I’d title a file “Movie Script 010711″.  The next time I’d work on a project, I’d save it for whatever date it was then; for this example, if I worked on it a week later, it’d be “Movie Script 011411″.

A number of times, however, I’ve run into problems where projects roll over into the new year.  After the first draft in the new year, the latest draft will be buried in the middle of all my previous drafts:

Movie Script 010711
Movie Script 011411
Movie Script 121210
Movie Script 123010

For this reason, I’m switching over to YearMonthDay format.  That way the most recent file is always on the bottom (or top) of the list, and I don’t have to have extra folders for 2010 drafts and the like:

Movie Script 101212
Movie Script 101230
Movie Script 110107
Movie Script 110114

Also, I email copies of each draft to myself as an additional backup.  With Gmail now up to a 7.5GB capacity, it makes for easy and free off-site storage.