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Organizing Data January 2003 • Vol.7 Issue 1 Page(s) 9-12 in print issue |
Organize Files & Folders Put Everything In Its Place | ||
Jump to first occurrence of: [FOLDERS]  Learning about computer files and folders is like learning about finance for the first time. Interest rates, investments, and taxes can be incredibly dull topics, at least until they apply to your own money. The best way to keep this discussion on files and folders interesting is to try to imagine your own digital photos, music tracks, and personal documents in place of our examples. We'll talk about how your files are stored in Windows 95/98/Me/XP and intelligent ways to organize them. And that's really what a personal computer is all about: organizing your stuff so it's easy to find and easy to use.  Hierarchical Storage Concepts. Think about what would happen if you just kept all your important papers in a pile on the floor. As you received letters, bills, and paychecks, you would simply add them to the pile. This might be OK for a week or two—if your spouse or roommate didn't revolt, that is. The problem is that if you really needed to find something quickly, such as last week's insurance premium statement, you would waste a tremendous amount of time digging through the pile. The same mess ensues when you save all your computer files in the same area on your hard drive. Eventually, you will have to look through scads of unrelated files just to find the one you want. If we had to come up with a solution for the pile of papers in our example, we would pick up a file cabinet or two from the office supply store. While we were at it, we would buy a good number of file cabinet folders that we could label. Next, we would sit down with the big pile of documents and sort it into many smaller piles, such as bills, bank statements, and letters. Finally, we would label a folder for each of these smaller piles, fill it, and file it in the cabinet. It may take a while to do all this, but it's much more organized than a sprawling pile on the floor. The best part about it is that if we have to locate last month's credit card statement while we're on the phone with a customer service representative, it should take a minute instead of a whole afternoon. Computer operating systems such as Windows use a similar concept to store files on hard drives and other storage media. It's called a hierarchical storage system because of its hierarchy of directories. Directories are groups of files and often subdirectories that hold still more files and subdirectories. Certain directories may be called drives (for storage devices or parts of them) or folders (subdirectories of drives). As an example, a text document called Testdoc.txt might have this file path: C:\MY DOCUMENTS\Testdoc.txt This means that the document Testdoc.txt is "in" or "under" the My Documents folder, which is on the hard drive partition (division of the drive's total storage space) labeled C:. If there were too many text documents in the My Documents folder, we could make new subfolders inside it, such as Work Docs or Personal Docs. If we moved Testdoc.txt into Work Docs, its new file path would be: C:\MY DOCUMENTS\WORK DOCS\Testdoc.txt Just for fun, let's be complete nerds and come up with a hypothetical file path for the credit card statement we mentioned above. There's no real reason to do so except to help cement the concept of hierarchical storage in your mind. Here goes: BEIGE FILE CABINET\CREDIT CARD FOLDER\Statement Oct 2001 If we had to divide the credit card folder later into MasterCard and Visa subfolders, we would have: BEIGE FILE CABINET\CREDIT CARD FOLDER\MASTERCARD\Statement Oct 2001 Now that you understand why it's good to organize your files, we'll show you how to actually do it. Exploring. The easiest way to grasp Windows' file storage hierarchy is to play around with Windows Explorer (not to be confused with Internet Explorer). Right-click Start and click Explore. ( NOTE: If you're new to Windows, remember that the term "click" refers to the left mouse button and "right-click" refers to the right button.) The left panel in Windows Explorer shows things near the top of the hierarchy, such as the Desktop, hard drive(s), and folders. Windows Explorer's right panel shows the folders and/or files stored in the drive or folder highlighted in the left panel. There's a scroll bar on the right side of each panel. Click its black arrow buttons to scroll up or down the list, or click and drag the scroll bar in either direction. (NOTE: Click and drag, also called drag and drop, means to click an object with the left mouse button and hold the button down as you move the mouse. Let the button up when the object is where you want it.) Click any folder or drive in the left panel once to highlight it, and the right panel will display its contents. If you don't like the right panel's looks, click the View menu near the top of the screen. Next, click List or Details for straight file information; Large Icons or Small Icons in Win95/98/Me; Thumbnails in WinMe/XP; or Icons or Tiles in WinXP. Near the top of the left panel, under Desktop and My Computer, is an entry labeled C:. This represents part or all of the computer's primary hard drive. Click the tiny white box to its left with the plus (+) or minus (-) sign a few times. This will either show you the folders in the C: directory (called expanding the branch, or displaying that level of the hierarchy) or hide them to unclutter your view (called collapsing the branch). If you were looking for the C:\MY DOCUMENTS\Testdoc.txt document we discussed in the last section, you would click the + or – box next to the C: drive, or directory, to expand its branch. Next, you would do the same with the box next to the MyDocuments folder. Now click the My Documents entry to highlight it, and the right panel will show the folder's contents.
Next, we'll make the two subfolders from our earlier example. Click File and New again. This time, however, click Folder instead of Text Document. A new folder will materialize in My Documents. Type Work Docs as its name, then press ENTER. Repeat the procedure, but this time name the folder Personal Docs. If you goof while naming Testdoc.txt or either folder, don't panic. Right-click the misspelled file or folder. A context menu will appear. Click Rename, type the corrected file name, and press ENTER. Moving. Now that you've made a file and some folders, let's talk about how to move them around. The simplest way is to click and drag them from one place on your system to another. In the right panel, click-and-drag Test-doc.txt into the Work Docs folder, letting go of the button to "drop" the file into the folder. Double-click Work Docs to open the folder, so you can make sure Test-doc.txt is inside. You can click and drag individual files or entire folders (along with all of their subfolders and files) from one place to another, from the right panel to the left and vice versa. Clicking and dragging a file from one part of the hard drive to another, such as from C:\MY DOCUMENTS to C:\MULTIMEDIA FILES, will move it. However, if you drag a file to a removable storage drive, such as the A: directory (the 3.5-inch diskette drive), assuming a diskette with enough room is inserted, Windows will copy the file to it. There will still be an identical version of the file left behind in the original directory.
Before you abandon yourself to a file-moving frenzy, we have one word of caution. Don't move things out of the Windows or Program Files folders or any files that are part of an application. At best, you could disable an application. At worst, Windows may no longer work so well, if at all. If you're new to computing, stick to moving your personal documents around for now. Organizing. You have all the pieces; now it's time to put together the puzzle. We've talked about how files and folders work in a hierarchy for the sole purpose of making it easy for you to find them. Next, we discussed how to create and name folders and move files into or out of them. The point is to empower you to arrange your folders in a way that makes sense to you. Files of a feather. This one may seem obvious, but it's smart to save your files in different folders according to some sort of plan. Applications ask you to name the files and documents you create before you save them for the first time. They also let you choose the folder in which to save them. Choose an appropriate folder instead of the default location, which is often C:\MY DOCUMENTS in Win95/98/Me and C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\your username\MY DOCUMENTS in WinXP. My Documents is convenient, but if you dump all of your files there willy-nilly, it will eventually become as big a mess as that pile of mail we talked about earlier. One alternative is to save your files according to the applications you used to create them. For example, you might save all of your PowerPoint presentations in a new folder in My Documents named Powerpoint Stuff. Organizing your files by application can pay off when you really, really need to find your latest presentation before a surprise meeting, for instance. Another school of thought advocates saving files by type. For example, you may save all of your digital photos in a My Documents folder called My Pictures and all of your MP3 files in another named My Music. The advantage to saving files by type—not by application—is that it's an agnostic method. It doesn't matter if your research paper is in DOC (Microsoft Word), RTF (Rich Text Format), or TXT (text) format, or whether you wrote it using OpenOffice.org, Word, or Volkswriter. If it's a paper you wrote, it will be in the My Papers folder you created. You'll probably use elements of both methods as you organize your PC's files and folders. For example, saving by application isn't a bad idea if you only use one type of software to make a certain kind of file. However, if you use several similar applications, a folder containing files by type is the way to go. Separate partitions. This is a tricky concept, but it's important enough to include here. Many hard drives are partitioned, or set up to have more than one drive letter (directory). For example, a single hard drive may have the drive letters C:, D:, and E:, even though the only differences among the partitions involve which areas of the drive's magnetic hard disks they correspond to. A file stored in C:\MY DOCUMENTS may be on the same physical hard disk and drive as a file in D:\HARDWARE DRIVERS, but Windows treats them as if they're on entirely different hard drives. Users often call partitions "drives," as in "the E: drive." The point of all this is that it's a good idea to have your operating system (such as Windows) on one partition, your applications (such as Word) on another, and your saved data and documents on a third. If something goes very wrong and you have to reinstall Windows, at least it will cause minimal disruption to the applications on another partition (you will still have to reinstall your applications to get Windows to recognize them, but at least their settings files may not be overwritten). The same goes for the data you store on the third partition in the event that you have to reinstall an application. Better still, keeping all your data on the third partition (the E: drive in our scenario) makes it easy to find it when you back it up to tape or optical disc. To separate Windows, your apps, and your data, remember this simple trick. Whenever you install an application and it asks you into which folder it should install itself, change the first letter of the file path from "C:" to "D:". For example, if the program wants to install itself in C:\PROGRAM FILES\DANTZ, change it to D:\PROGRAM FILES\DANTZ. Save the personal files you make in appropriate folders on the E: drive in the same fashion. If your hard drive doesn't have three partitions, we recommend software such as Partition Magic ($69.95; http://www.powerquest.com) or Partition Commander ($29.95 download; http://www.v-com.com). These are superior to the FDISK utility in DOS and on Windows boot disks because they can partition your hard drive without erasing all its data, including Windows. If your hard drive is 2GB or smaller, you may not want to bother with partitioning it. Partition Commander supports Win95 through WinXP, but Partition Magic requires at least Win95b or later. Archiving old applications. With hard drives getting so cheap—as low as $87 for 80GB, as this is written—users are suddenly likely to have much more data storage space than they know what to do with. Some users with libraries of old software may want to copy those aging diskettes to their hard drives. After all, hard drives can be more stable than floppy diskettes for long-term data storage. Furthermore, with a CD-RW (CD-rewriteable) or recordable DVD drive, users can burn (write) those old apps to inexpensive and long-lasting discs using the hard drive as a temporary staging area. If you decide to preserve digital arcana this way, here's a hint. Create a different folder for each old application, such as E:\OLD APPS\WORDPERFECT 5.1. Next, create a separate folder inside the application's folder for each diskette, such as DISK 1, DISK 2, and so on. "Why bother?" you may ask. It's because many old programs expect to install from the A: diskette drive and may be too dumb to install from any other media. If you ever need to install an old program for whatever reason, first copy it to diskette(s) from the CD, DVD, or hard drive. If you have a ton of old programs you feel are worth keeping, make alphabetical folders such as A, B, Numerical, and so on. Move the application folders into the correct alphabetical folders to keep things straight.  by Marty Sems View the "The (Dis)organized PC" illustration. (NOTE: These pages are PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these pages. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader )
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