Evernote for active vs. archived projects?

[therearenoroadshere 1]

Hello everyone.

Recently embarking on the paperless journey, I have quickly realized that for the elegant simplicity of naming and tagging documents to be thrown into the Evernote soup and retrieved later via metadata or a robust search, there are many hang-ups in doing so with documents that one either needs to edit, ammend, aggregate, or otherwise tinker with while doing work. Whether these documents are as basic as MS Office or as complex as large statistical data sets, there are things that, at this juncture, just cannot live happily in my Evernote world.

Without a boring discourse, I really have two fundamental questions:

1. For those who require a file structure outside of evernote to do work (be it because of file formatting, frequent editing, sharing with non-evernoters, firewall issues for EN syncing, etc) - what, if any, program(s) do you use to achieve a similar level of ubiquitous access to your files as is provided in Evernote (i.e. Dropbox, Sugarsync, GDrive, etc.).?
   
2. Whether you use a cloud sync tool or not, what is your preferred method of folder/file nomenclature/project structure? Does your file and folder nomenclature change if the documents are to eventually be archived in Evernote? I have grown quite fond of the YYMMDD prefix that Grumpy Monkey has adapted for his digital life, but I am struggling with how such a filing identifier can be adopted into a file naming system which also uses things like job (project) identifier codes (i.e. project 172C) to categorize and track things like costing, logistics coordination and billing.
   

Thank you all in advance for your valuable input on these forums. Without your willingness to share your experiences, I would still be mired in the paper/digital hinterland with the lion's share of my colleagues. It has drastically changed the way I approach information and work.

[gazumped 11,652]

Don't see why there's any limit to the documents stored in Evernote other than security/ confidentiality - and most of those concerns can be addressed by encrypting files or drives and using local notebooks where appropriate. There is no "perfect" process - quite a few of the systems that work for others would 1) drive me batty and (more importantly) 2) get forgotten or be inconsistently applied, so as to render them worthless. The only fundamental test of any system is: can you live with it?

I use Gdrive and Dropbox and external hard drives, and have a process which involves working on projects on my desktop, but storing the work-in-progress in Evernote between actual work sessions. I use extra, temporary notebooks to hold data in transit, and name / tag the contents back into general population once some local tasks are complete.

My naming structure involves "yyyymmdd keyword keyword keyword" where the keywords include medium (email, letter, phone call etc) / originator (boss, gas company, school) / subject (project or service name, reason etc)

The issue of Archiving hasn't yet come up, but I imagine that older items will just be hived off into a 2010 / 2011 / 2012 notebook structure.

I mix dated and undated material shamelessly in my notebooks, because the creation date is an increasingly accurate indication of when a note was written; the search language is my primary way of finding material - which is universally OCR'd on scan.