Version control
A very compelling benefit to our neat hierarchical organization scheme is that it lends itself to easy integration with version control systems. Version control systems, at a basic level, allow one to track changes/revisions to a set of files, and easily roll back to previous states of the set of files.
A simple (and inadequate) approach is to compress your analysis project at regular intervals, and post-fix the filename of each compressed copy with a timestamp. This way, if you make a mistake, and would like to revert to a previous version, all you have to do is delete your current project and un-compress the project from the time you want to roll back to.
A far more sane solution is to use a remote file synchronization service that features revision tracking. The most popular of these services at the time of writing is Dropbox, though there are others such as TeamDrive and Box. These services allow you to upload your project into the cloud. When you make changes to your local...
