Files & Folders Mastery — Handout

Files, folders and paths

• A file is one saved thing — a letter, a photograph, a song, a spreadsheet. It has a name, takes up space, and survives the machine being switched off.
• A folder holds files and other folders. A folder inside a folder is a subfolder, and that one idea repeated is a whole filing system.
• A path is a file’s full address:C:\Documents\School\Term 1\notes.docxEach backslash means “and inside that”. A file name alone is ambiguous; a path never is.
• Back retraces your steps. Up always goes to the folder that contains this one. They are not the same button, and confusing them wastes time.

Note: on a real Windows machine your personal folders live inside C:\Users\<your name>\. The simulation hangs them straight off C: so the paths stay short enough to read on a small screen.

Selecting — four techniques

• Click — one item.
• Ctrl+click — add or remove one item without losing the rest. It is a toggle.
• Click, then Shift+click — everything between the two, inclusive.
• Drag a rectangle from empty space — everything the rectangle touches.
• Ctrl+A — everything in the folder.

Copy, move, delete and compress all act on whatever is selected. Selecting well is most of the speed.

Copy versus move — the expensive confusion

Copy (Ctrl+C) leaves the original where it was and makes a second, independent file. Editing one does nothing to the other. Cut (Ctrl+X) moves: the file leaves where it was — but not until you paste (Ctrl+V). A cut you never paste changes nothing at all.

• Dragging within the same drive MOVES. Hold Ctrl while dragging to copy instead.
• Dragging between drives (C: to a USB stick) COPIES — the computer will not remove your only copy from one disk until it is safely written to the other.
• Pasting where the name already exists gives you Report - Copy.docx, extension intact.

Tidying an old folder away? Move. Giving somebody a file on their stick? Copy — or you hand over your only one.

Deleting, and the one exception

Delete moves a file to the Recycle Bin, which holds it until you empty the bin. Restore puts an item back in the exact folder it was deleted from — the bin remembers, so you do not have to.

• Shift+Delete skips the bin entirely. There is no way back.
• Removable drives have no Recycle Bin. Delete from a USB stick, memory card or camera and it is gone immediately. This one catches people out badly.
• Emptying the bin is one of very few genuinely irreversible buttons on a computer.

Finding things again

• Views — Details for deciding (name, date, type, size in sortable columns), Large icons for pictures, List for scanning names quickly, Tiles for a compromise. Changing view changes nothing but the drawing.
• Sorting — click a column heading; click it again to reverse. Sorting never moves, renames or changes a file. Size descending is the fastest disk-space diagnosis there is; Date modified descending answers “what was I working on?”
• Search — a fragment of the name is enough, capitals do not matter, and *.pdf finds every PDF. Search only looks in the folder you are standing in and everything below it. That single fact explains almost every failed search: check the address bar before you check the spelling.
• Filter — hides everything that is not the kind of file you chose. A filter left switched on is a classic cause of “my files have disappeared”.
• Properties — a file’s real type, exact size, precise location and when it last changed.

File types

The letters after the last dot are the extension, and they are how the computer decides which program opens the file. Rename them away and the file is intact but nothing knows what to do with it.

.exe deserves special care. Double-clicking one does not open a document — it runs software on your machine. An unexpected .exe is the classic route a computer gets infected.

Where files can live

Always eject a USB drive before pulling it out — Windows may still be finishing writing to it. This platform has no real storage backend, so cloud storage is taught as a concept rather than faked as a fifth drive letter.

Compressing and extracting

• A ZIP is a box: many files packed into one, usually smaller.
• Documents and spreadsheets shrink dramatically. Photographs, music and video barely shrink at all — they are already compressed. Zipping a folder of photos is worth doing to get one attachment, not to save space.
• Extract before you work. A ZIP opens and looks exactly like a folder, which is the trap: a document edited straight from inside an archive often cannot be saved. Extract first, then open the extracted file.
• Extracting copies the contents out. The archive stays where it is, still packed.

Naming files

The test of a name: could somebody else — or you in six months — guess the contents from the name alone?

Backup — the 3-2-1 rule

Three copies of anything you would be upset to lose, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else entirely. That last point is the one everyone skips, and the one that survives a fire or a theft.

A copy in another folder on the same drive is not a backup — the drive is what fails. A backup you have never opened to check is not a backup either.

Designing a filing system

1. Group by what you will be thinking about when you go looking — subject, client, year, project. Not by file type: nobody goes looking for “a PDF”.
2. Be consistent. “Term 1” and “term one” scatter when sorted.
3. Keep it shallow. Two levels handles most personal filing; past four you click more than you save.
4. One folder, one kind of thing. If you cannot describe its contents in three words, split it.

The test: when a new file arrives, do you know instantly where it goes? If you have to think every time, the structure is wrong.