Zoomer here, and I do indeed have questions about computers- how do filesystems work, and why should we care (I know we should, but I'm not exactly sure why)?
So why should we care?
You need to know where your own files are.
I've got a file on a flash drive that's been handed to me, or an archival data CD/DVD/Bluray, or maybe it's a big heavy USB external hard drive and I need to make a copy of it on my local machine.
Do I know how to navigate to that portable media device within a file browser?
Where will I put that data on my permanent media (e.i. my laptop's hard drive)?
How will I be able to reliably find it again?
We'll cover more of the Why and How, but this will take some time, and a few addendum posts because I'm actively hitting the character limit and I've rewritten this like 3 times.
Let's start with file structure
Files live on drives: big heavy spinning rust hard drives, solid state m.2 drives, USB flash drives, network drives, etc. Think of a drive like a filing cabinet in an office.
You open the drawer, it's full of folders. Maybe some folders have other folders inside of them. The folders have a little tab with a name on it showing what's supposed to be in them. You look inside the folders, there are files. Pieces of paper. Documents you wrote. Photographs. Copies of pages from a book. Maybe even the instruction booklet that came with your dishwasher.
We have all of that here, but virtualized! Here's a helpful tree structure that Windows provides to navigate through all of that. In the case of Windows, it's called Explorer. On OSX MacOS, the equivalent is called Finder.
I don't have to know where exactly everything is, but I have a good idea where thing *should* based on how I organize them. Even things that don't always expose the file structure to you have one (like my cellphone on the right). I regularly manually copy my files off of my cellphone by going to the Camera folder so I can sift through them on a much bigger screen and find the best ones to share. There are other reasons I prefer to do it that way, but we won't go into that here. Some people prefer to drag and drop, but that doesn't always work the same between operating systems. I prefer cut and paste.
Standby for Part 2!
Operating on files purely in the cloud is not always going to be an option to get work done on a computer, and it may not give you the above tree structure.
We all have to get work done on a computer, be it for our dayjobs, school work, and of course general paperwork for surviving in today's modern existence. Paperless society or not, paperwork persists.
Not every document can be filled out in an online form, and even if they did, you probably want digital and physical copies of important documents that you will need later. Tax paperwork, your syllabus for each class, resumes, rental applications, car payments, loans, mortgages, insurance, etc.
You can't always rely on "show recent files" feature of an application to give you a clear indication of that file you just saved [gestures vaguely] somewhere.
You can't always trust that the file search feature is going to be helpful at finding the things you're after.
If you come to rely on these tools, and one day they break after a migration to a new computer or operating system, suddenly you can't find that one PDF talking about your health benefits from when you got that new job 5 years ago.
I know some folks prefer metadata tags on things rather than hunting for the files in question, but that isn't always going to be possible on some systems. Corporate/school environments won't necessarily give you this option. If they want you to go find a file that's kept in shared drive X:, you will need to understand how to traverse their folder structure to go find it. File searches in these situations tend to fail spectacularly, or they go slower than molasses because they aren't all pre-indexed. Up until recently, we had a networked Google drive at my job that Windows file search could not find anything in sooner than 10 minutes.
-
I should define the concept of the desktop (I don't mean like desktop vs. laptop). Much like my file cabinet/folder analogy from before, we'll use a desk concept. Pretend I'm at a school desk and it's the 1960s. I've got a few things in front of me, maybe some colored pencils for drawing. Maybe a nice pen for writing. A calculator slide rule for doing math. Maybe a notebook, a tiny calendar, and a book from the library.
Each of those items are arranged on the top of my desk for easy access. Each one serves a specific purpose, and with my desktop, I can have a few of them out at once if I'm doing work that needs more than one at a time. Maybe I want to read a section in the book to write down notes on paper. Maybe I want to draw a graph with the colored pencils. The idea is that all of these tools are at the ready, easily visible and arrangeable for the task at hand.
So too goes for a computer desktop. I've got icons that are shortcuts to let me start a web browser, a media player, a video game, a text editor, a drawing program. I've got a taskbar at the bottom to keep track of all the things I'm actively doing. I can manage not only my workload, but the computer's workload. All from my desktop! I can even make shortcuts (we'll get to those) to places that I frequently want to visit that have files relevant to what I'm doing.
But more importantly, I can store things on the desktop. It's a just a fancy folder like before. However, I highly recommend against getting into that habit. You could pile every song, picture, and pdf you had on the desktop. And that'd be fine for 10, maybe 50 files at most but if you've got 1000 files? That ain't gonna work.
You especially do not want to store most of your files on the desktop (even in folders you made on the desktop) if you're using a networked domain Windows account (like what you would be issued at work or school). Because it's slow. Every file you save there has to be loaded again on login, which has to come from a central server across a building, or maybe even miles away to get to you. If you aren't always using the same computer each time like I did in college, each time you log in, all of those files may have to be locally cached on that computer before you can start to do anything. I've seen this first hand at my old job, some employees waited like 5 minutes from logging in before they could start doing any work. They had a bad time, until I showed them a better place to keep those files.
Standby for part 3.
Alright, last bit for now.
Lets talk about Shortcuts with some visual assistance from @ms-dos5 who's providing screenshots for me to use (thanks for the help!)
See that little arrow on the bottom left corner of these icons? These are shortcuts to files that exist somewhere else. The good news is that we can see where that is with a little effort.
All of these shortcuts take up very little drive space, a proverbial spec of dust compared to the actual file they're a shortcut to. If I copy them to some other location, I'm not actually copying the file, just a link to that file somewhere else. If I wanted to send that readme to a friend over discord, or put it in a network share, they'd get a tiny little useless shortcut file, rather than the actual readme text file.
I want to see where those files actually exist, because maybe there's some config file I want to check or modify. Let's go to properties and follow the breadcrumbs.
Ah, okay. The real file is located elsewhere, so let's copy that path (a name for the folder structure on display here) and see what else is stored there.
Here we go. This is the file I was after. Now I can copy or move this with the certainty that this is the real deal. Note how under "Type" it says "Text Document" or "Application" or something specific rather than just "Shortcut".
So, final takeways:
Play around with your computer. Your cellphone interface obfuscates how alot of these things work, but a laptop or desktop computer will provide a far better playground for you to try traversing your file structure a bit to see where things are
Arrange your files in ways that make sense to you
Don't be afraid to poke around in folders and see what's stored where, just try not to delete anything that you don't understand
Ask someone proficient to show you in person how they organize their files, because demonstrations tend to work a bit better
Own your computer, own your files, and take control
Keep those questions coming! I'll help how I can.
