Every year for Black Friday a particular retailer, with a slogan about being easy, offers label makers for about $10-$20.  Since buying one a few years back, I label every cable that comes with any product.  Well, not my Apple products of course.  Then I can quickly tell which cable is for what device.  It has reduced the issues you encountered.

I still get issues where microsoft products simply refuse to work as they should, resulting in flash drives not showing up, removable Western Digital drives not showing up, drives just disappearing for no reason...  Usually I can fix those by obtaining non-microsoft drivers.

That said, I have a mental list of things to do before vacations and such, and making sure the memory cards are empty is one such task. For my camera, i make sure that I empty it after every event I tape. If I could only get my kids to play nice, and empty the camera SD cards when they take my camera to shoot pictures...