ok so this has been bugging me for a while and i finally hit a wall last week when i mixed up two clients folders and nearly sent the wrong property footage to the wrong realtor. nothing bad happened but it was a close call and it made me realize my whole system is kind of held together with duct tape.

right now im basically just dumping everything onto an external drive organized by date and then the client name but i dont have any real naming convention and my editing folder structure is all over the place. some jobs have the raw files in the same folder as the exports which is a nightmare when youre looking for something months later.

im not looking for some crazy enterprise solution or anything, just curious what other solo operators are doing to keep things sane. especially around how you deliver the final files ? are you using dropbox, wetransfer, google drive, something else? and do you do anything special for archiving old jobs or do you just keep everything forever

frame.io changed things for me on the delivery side, clients can comment directly on the video and you can see exactly what theyve watched which is weirdly useful. its not free but for client facing stuff its way more professional than a dropbox link. for my own folder structure i do client name then job date then inside that i have RAW, EDIT, EXPORT and DELIVERED as subfolders, never mix them. sounds simple but having that same structure every single time means i can find anything in like 10 seconds even from two years ago.

i just use google drive and honestly its fine for real estate volume. most realtors already have google accounts so theres no friction for them to download. the thing that saved me was starting a simple spreadsheet ? job date, client, location, which drive the raw footage is on, whether its been delivered and invoiced. took me 20 minutes to set up and i wish i had done it from day one instead of month nine. also archive old jobs to a dedicated cold storage drive once a project is fully closed out, i dont keep everything on my working drive forever or id need a new one every few months