Pretty much everything I've instituted as protocol has already been described here...and it took a few years to evolve to this point. We do very little custom printing, lots of printing for our catalog and tons of printing for events, so we have three slight variables.
Custom jobs just have the file naming convention of "Customer Name - Job Name - Print Location.psd" So, we've got "Willies General Store - Frog Face - FP.psd", which then gets ripped to a permanent set of "digital films." As long as the artwork isn't changed and gets approved the first time that will be our reference copy forever. For event work we throw the event name in front instead of the customer name. For in-house catalog work we go with "SKU - Job Name - Print Location." All of this is saved to the corporate network which is to a double-redundant RAID 5 hot-swappable NAS, also backed up to the cloud and to rolling tape backups...and I also keep a local copy of the RIPs folder on the RIP machine, just in case the server goes down we can still RIP new art and print old art. It's happened.
This way, especially for in-house work, on the CTS since it defaults to the last folder we just go to file>open and type in the SKU and pick which print and go from there.
As has already been mentioned, if the art gets changed at all the RIPs get destroyed upon confirmation of new art.
We used to just RIP every single time right to a hot folder the CTS monitors, so we'd have no RIPs anywhere. This proved to not be ideal. The cost of archiving the data was far outweighed by being at the mercy of the servers and entire network, which dwarfs my department's network in complexity and unreliability. Gigabytes are dirt cheap nowadays...not to mention having a hard reference version of a graphic/rip that is time and date stamped is a fantastic way to monitor for accountability.
