How do you keep track of how many times your brass has been loaded and fired ?
Flashkayak
I don't any more.
Welcome to the forum and to reloading. I see from your other posts that you shoot and reload for handguns. Manual action rifle shooters find it useful to count the number of times brass has been shot. Semi-auto rifle shooters, not so much and handgun shooters hardly at all.
Why?
Semi-auto fired bottlenecked cartridges generally should be full-length resized (to ensure reliable feeding and chambering). Bolt-action, single shot rifle shooters generally shoot lower quantities and can pay more attention to each individual cartridge case, tracking their individual lives (or each individual batch's lives).
Keeping track of how many times a case has been fired and how many times it has had its shoulder bumped back will give clues to performance and, if one cartridge case shows signs of incipient head separation or case-neck cracking its similarly-aged brethren are probably not far behind in the need for annealing or discard. So, for bottlenecked cartridges, there is considerable value in knowing how many times a case has been neck-re-sized, full-length-resized, annealed, etc as well as if the loadings were mild or hot. Just like airplane engines have their hours assiduously tracked, brass can benefit by keeping a history.
When I started out shooting and loading (at the same time), I kept each box of 50 (my first gun was a .357 Magnum Dan Wesson revolver) together and inside the lid of each box was a piece of paper with spaces for the load data of each reloading/firing cycle. I carefully kept each batch of 50 cases in its own box and recorded the loads.
That lasted about 7 cycles. I asked myself, "What value is all this effort?" Mildly loaded, my brass seemed on the road to lasting forever. One batch I loaded hot suffered a significant percentage of split cases the next time out. So I determined that there is SOME value to knowing the history of my brass. But I decided there was not enough (for my style of shooting) to justify the effort. If I stressed my brass (like silhouette shooters and the like) I would do it, but I am not, so I don't.
Just as some high-accuracy and well-organized and meticulous shooters will weigh their brass (and even their primers) and derive significant benefit from their efforts and others (like me) do not, you will have to make your own decision.
For my semi-auto guns, the mixing of my batches of brass on the ground with each other and with other shooters' brass makes keeping track pointless.
Good luck. Good shooting.
Lost Sheep