As it is approaching the end of the year and I am likely to have some time in January with my technician to do a number of updatesStudio 2021, I thought I would use the opportunity to have an early spring clean, as syncing my laptop is becoming an increasingly slow process, and try to find out what others, who also use Studio 2021 in standalone (desktop) mode do for housekeeping.

A few of my practices that spring to mind from my experience (given the high frequency of short translations 100-500 words)

1) A monthly "catch all" project for each department (Banking Supervision, Insurance Supervision, Securities Supervision etc.) for handling brief ad hoc requests so that I don't have to set up a new project for every new request

2) Since a lot of my translations are related to our website, I work with HTML files compiled in Notepad++ (needing just a copy/paste in WordPress (we have WPML but the amount of cruft it spits out makes it unusable)).

3) Projects that are no longer active are not just removed from the list, but the folders are kept on a drive that only I (or a technician) can access so that they are not being needlessly synced the whole time

4) Standardised naming of files/projects (I receive a lot of files called "document1.docx") so, when they come in they are renamed as YYMMDD - [Dept] - [Customer Abbreviation] - [rest of filename]. The recent for the [Dept] and [Customer Abbreviation] is that some staff members change departments so I can still find items by Department. All staff members have a two or three letter unique abbreviation, which also makes it easier to find historic items (for that case when a colleague says "My predecessor XYZ said you translated a similar document for him once") 

I am most interested to find out what others store once projects are finished. A lot of the Word documents I deliver are stored in our electronic filing system and I can find them that way. I have backups of course of all TMs and TBs that I have compiled over the years, but also have the collection in 3) that covers every project over the last 7 years (I have to theoretically keep everything for up to 10 years). I have my own area in SharePoint to allow me to track files and previous jobs and date received and date returned, as well as to be able to back up my timesheets in terms of projects listed.

What tools do you use?

Any practices you recommend?

Any bad experiences you can mention so that others don't make the same mistake?