When developing any form of multimedia you are usually dealing with a large number of files of different formats, often spread over many drives and being worked on by a number of people. A project can very quickly become a mess. Prior planning and organisation is paramount.
Almost all these problems stem from inadequate file management. It is essential that you adopt a system that all team members agree to abide by. What follows are some general conventions and guidelines.
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Backup all your files regularly to a central disk or disks. Make one person only responsible for backing up the team's work and storing it safely. Also, when working on a file don't continually save over the same file - choose Save As and increment a 2 digit number prefixed to the filename. That way you'll always have a previous version to fall back to if there's a problem eg:
myfile_01.wrl
myfile_02.wrl
myfile_03.wrl ... etc
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In addition to the above advice you should get into the habit of naming your files in a way that makes them easy to find, groups similar files together in a directory listing and is compatible with all file systems. These are the golden rules:
myfile_01.wrl
myfile_02.wrl
myfile_03.wrl
myfile.wrl
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Avoid the temptation of either saving everything into the one directory or saving files to the directory that the application defaults to. Setup your own directory structure and ensure everything gets saved into the correct folder eg:
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If you are working as a team in a shared network environment it is essential that all files are stored centrally, preferrably on a network drive that everyone has access to. It's often the case that network newbies work individually then try to bring everything together at the end of the project. You end up with a huge mess of files, spread over numerous drives, with multiple versions of the same file and filenames that are meaningless to the other team members.
Work as a team ... both on and off the network!
Also, it is very important that multiple team members avoid working on the same file at the same time (the network will usually prevent this anyway).
Reminder: when working on a central network drive you must still take personal responsibility for backing up your own files on a regular basis. Don't assume the system administrator will do it.
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What follows is a typical, well ordered, directory structure for a house project that is still underway. Notice that, by using prefixes and suffixes in your filenames, different groups of elements are easy to find as they are ordered alphabetically. This becomes increasingly important as your project grows in size and complexity.