Best practices for organizing folders & files and saving data in Windows_Part 2 of 2

Note: this is a bit lengthy so I've broken it into two questions. This is part 2 of 2.

Hello,

I would love to get some advice on how to most efficiently organize files & folders in Windows 7. There are obviously an unlimited number of ways to approach this but hopefully a few suggestions can be posted by people who are happy with their current system — because I definitely am not.

Perhaps the two things I'm looking for most are:

1) please see Part 1 of 2

2) how to best save periodic or sequential versions of files that I use or continually work on over long periods of time. One of my most despised and frustrating scenarios — which I suspect all of us have experienced at one time or another — is not being able to locate or access a file into which I have poured hours of time. Or even if it's not a lot of time, maybe it's an idea or some solution which I cannot now recall.

A similar scenario is when, after pursuing a particular direction on a project, you run into a dead-end and realize that you need to backtrack several hours or even several days to change directions — but you no longer have a version of the file from the precise point in time to which you would like to return.

A number of years back, in an attempt to eliminate or at least dramatically reduce the chances of running into this type of problem, I got in the habit of repeatedly saving files under the same name but combined with a sequentially increasing date-stamp suffix. For example, a single Excel workbook might repeatedly be saved over time as:

abc.xlsx_2013-05-28
abc.xlsx_2013-05-30
abc.xlsx_2013-05-31
abc.xlsx_2013-06-02
abc.xlsx_2013-06-03
... and so on ...

or even:

abc.xlsx_2013-06-06a
abc.xlsx_2013-06-06b
abc.xlsx_2013-06-06c
abc.xlsx_2013-06-06d
abc.xlsx_2013-06-06e
... etc.

if a large amount of time was spent on it in a single day.

I suspect that most people who spend much time at a computer deal with the same issues or concerns. Therefore, as mentioned above, I'm hopeful that someone has come across a better retrieval system which they can share.

Thanks