Having spent three hours searching for the files of something I was working on, I feel compelled to write:

In addition to a regular, reliable backup system, you need organisation. You need to be able to find exactly what you're looking for within a few moments. Not just stories, but publication details and dates, contracts, receipts (conventions and equipment can be tax deductable) and your entire writing business. They all need to be in the same place, stored according to the same system.

This is not negotiable - doing anything less is not taking yourself or your work seriously, and if you're not going to, why should anyone else?

But there are two kinds of filing systems - the kind designed for easy filing, and the kind designed for easy retrieval. Most of us are reasonably good at designing the former. Basic category systems like 'alphabetical', or 'time' exist to make filing easy, because you don't have to think when putting it away. If you story is called "Patchouli's Rage" then it's filed under P. Or possibly 'S' for 'story', if you're feeling really unimaginative.

But go down the track six months, twelve months, and you remember there was a story you were halfway through that would be perfect for the competition coming up. Now... what was it called? Where did you put it? Where was the porposal you had for the novel that was inspired by it? Yeah, good luck with that.

Retrieval-based filing systems are far more personal, and take a little time to devise beforehand, but they're well worth it in time saved looking for random stuff. It's very dependant on how you think, and what you remember consistently about your stories - that's what you should file on. Try not to choose things that can change, like titles, unless you're someone who secretly codenames all her stories with a code that doesn't change, or similar. And make sure that each story fits in only one category - that, I find, is the hardest part. Ensuring there will be only one place to look. That's the reason that things like alphabetical systems are so popular, because there is only one place to look, but the pothole there is that it only works if you can remember what the identifying feature (ie title) was. With mutable things like stories, where the title can change a dozen times before publication, you lose that certainty. So you have to create your own.

For me, (even though this file was AWOL, because I'd saved it in a hurry in the wrong place) I start out with a top teir of Format:  Prose (shorts, novellas, novels) Scripts, Poetry, Non-Fiction (non-fiction is technically prose, I know, but they're so separate in other ways), Games. (There are separate categorisation systems for things like contracts, receipts, etc and an entirely different section for technical or copywriting work. Unifying these into one whole system doesn't really add anything but a sense of OCD satisfaction, so keep things simple for yourself.)

Each format is divided into genres (I usually work in Sci-Fi, Horror, Spec-Fic, or Fantasy, but other genres are added when requried), and within each genre are folders for individual work, including all draft copies, notes, images and associated files. The folder is given either the title of the work, if it's a title particularly descriptive of the story, or a name describing the key idea or unique angle of the story, for me, such as "Man who smells colours" (random example).

My system still needs work - it's not terribly future-proofed (what happens when I have a hundred fantasy short stories there? Or three dozen novels?) though it's at least an improvement on the previous system that relied on the length of the piece (fails when I take a short story and turn it into a novel, and vice versa) or what kind of work it needed (redrafting, editing, submitting, etc) - required me to move things around, and I'd have to either look in one of four or five folders, or remember where I was up to in editing it).

I'm considering possibly grouping stories into common themes or tropes, or categorising based on main protagonist/POV gender, but both of those are extremely subjective - I might decide a theme is no longer in a story, or that another character was really the main. I may have to go with sub-genres, or secondary-genres.

But the point remains - you need to organise your files and your work not so that you can file things easily, but so that you can find them again. And then you need to make the effort to save everything that way.

Or you can go for massive overkill and embed your files in a database... *cough*.