Files, Folders and Drives
Basic Terms
File: Each document, a text file, a letter in Word, a song, picture or a program, is called a file.
Folder: Files are grouped together in folders, also called directories. They can also contain other folders or directories.
Drive/disk: A disk is a circular object on which you store your files and a drive is the device that has one or more disk in it that reads from and writes to it.
Your files and folders are stored on a hard disk on your computer or on a network drive, or on some kind of removable media like a floppy disk, a CD or DVD, a USB drive or other removable disk.
A large hard disk can be divided into several logical partitions or drives to make the space easier to work with and maintain. Early operating systems could only manage 32 megabytes at a time.
Drives are named with letters. The floppy drive is normally A. The hard drive is C, if you only have one hard drive. Your CD or DVD drive uses the first letter after all of your hard drives, so it will most likely be D. Network drives are usually further down the alphabet, like M or O. USB drives and other removable drives are temporarily assigned a letter when they are connected and the drive letter assigned is released when it is removed. Those letters can be reused by a different device as you plug in and remove various storage devices.
Path: The drive and folders you must go through to get to the folder or file that you want is called the path. A path always starts with a drive letter. The file that starts Notepad has the path C:\Windows\notepad.exe.
Files and folders can be created, renamed, copied, moved and deleted. There are certain folders and files that if modified in any way can stop your computer or a program from working.
Naming Files and Folders
In the old DOS days of computing, file names followed a strict naming structure
-- eight characters, a period, and three more characters; spaces could not be
used. Today’s operating systems now allow longer file names and spaces.
Windows file and/or folder names can contain up to 215 characters, including
spaces. But don't get carried away. Try to keep your file names to 10 to 20
characters, less is better. Short file names are easier to use. The file name
you give a file should identify what the file is or it’s content. File
names are generally followed by a period and three letters, called an extension.
In most cases, the program that you are using will automatically add the period
and extension. You may or may not see the extension depending on the way your
computer is set up. One important thing to know when naming files and/or folders:
names cannot contain the following special characters: / : * ? " < >
| and the file name can only be used once in the same folder or directory.
A folder may contain other folders. If you have created a new folder called Finances, you may want to have several folders in that folder called Bank, Stocks, Bonds, etc. A folder labeled Home may have folders inside labeled Record Inventory, Household, Utilities, etc. To create a folder within a folder, simply select (click once) a folder then choose the File-New Folder option from the file menu.
The Tree
The hard drive in your computer uses file configurations called a tree. The
tree has one trunk with many branches. The branches have many smaller branches,
and the smaller branches have many leaves. Consider your hard disk like the
trunk of a tree. Most computers only have one hard disk. Just as some trees
have two or three trunks, a computer may also have two or three hard disks or
one hard disk that is broken up in several parts. Right now, however, we will
only talk about the main hard disk. In Windows based computers it is named or
labeled C.