I work at a company with three different departments and about 15 different GIS users (ESRI). Our work is in natural resources and we have hundreds of large orthophotos and lidar data that take up a lot of space.
Right now, the three different departments "share" all the GIS data, but they store them on different servers (and have for 15 years). So at this point, even though most departments have the same data, they are stored in different places, organized differently, have different naming conventions, and taking up 3 times the storage space (since everyone has different instances of the same data), etc.
I have been tasked to consolidate all the data into one, shared, organized folder. We want to have everything stored in this "master" folder and have the departments using this master folder going forward.
We plan to have separate folders for orthophotos, lidar files, vector data, etc. Within those folders, we have agreed that every file should be named with some variation of the following metadata: year, source, and geography. Everyone has their own way organizing their data, and have for 15 years. Some people want it organized by year_source_geography, some want it geography_year_source, some want it source_year_geography, etc.
QUESTION:
1) Lets say that we all agree to sort the master folder by year_source_geography: is there a way to create other folders with different naming conventions that will "shortcut" to the master data? The idea is that everyone can still have their files (shortcuts) organized the way they want to, but without creating duplicate files. For example: in addition to the master folder which is sorted by year_source_geography, can we have another folder that is sorted by geography_year_source that will "shortcut" to the master list?
2) Do you have any comments on how I'm organizing this data? I'm fairly new to GIS organization, so any suggestions or comments on how I should be organizing this data is welcomed.
Thanks!
