Tips for managing a large number of files?

Question

There are some very good questions here on SO about file management and storing within a large project.

Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?
Would

Answer 1

One way is to assign a unique number to each file and use it to look up the actual file location. Then you an use that number to distribute files in different directories in the filesystem. For example you could use something like this scheme:

/images/{0}/{1}/{2}

{0}: file_number % 100
{1}: (file_number / 100) % 100
{2}: file_number