Managing Files

1. File Management Tools

Create a folder and file system, a way to organise and store both locally and in the cloud. You can name and rename files and folders. You can save and retrieve data. You can sort and search for specific files using a bunch of different criteria, such as the type of the file, the date it was created, and more. Here's a brief tour of the tools used to do this task in each common operating system you'll encounter these days. Microsoft Windows uses File Explorer as the primary file management tool. Access it from the taskbar. It shows folders on the left, with files and folders for further selection on the right. This is a classic tree structure. Select the folder to see the subfolders and files. Click on a subfolder to see the contents of that subfolder, and so on.

The primary file management tool in Apple Mac OS is Finder. You'll find Finder on the dock, which by default is along the bottom of the screen. The Finder's all the way over there on the left, a little Too Faced icon. It has an interface somewhat similar to File Explorer, and you can do the same things, sorting and searching by type, date, and so on. Most Linux distributions have some sort of file management tool, though the names change. A typical Ubuntu build uses a tool called Nautilus, which looks and quacks like most other file management tools. Chrome OS offers a slightly different experience because it's integrated tightly with Google Docs. All the folders and files are online and organized according to Google default rules. Even though the tool looks different, you can do the same file management as offerings from other developers. It's nice.

2. File Manipulation

It can have subfolders and files. That's pretty much the same way a computer's mass storage, like a hard drive, works. I have a computer with a single hard drive. The typical PC That drive has a bunch of folders on it. And in those folders are files, pieces of data that you can do stuff with. You can do five basic things with files. You can create them, copy, move, cut, and delete them. Let's start with how to create a file. Here I have a piece of paper with words on it. a word document. I'll just save it in a folder in the filing cabinet. Let's see what that looks like on a computer. There are many ways to create a file on a computer. To create a document, for example, right-click in a folder and select New and pick a file type for an application installed on that system, in this case, Microsoft Word. Give it a name, double-click the file, and Word will open. You can make changes and then click Save. Copying a file creates a duplicate file. I want to copy this file, this picture. So to the copy machine, and voila. Now I can save the copy of this picture to another folder, and the original goes right back to its original location. On a computer, you can copy a file in several ways. Right-click a file and select Copy, or press Control Plus C on the keyboard. Then go to the folder where you want to put the copy and right-click. And then choose Paste or press CTRL + V.

You can also use the mouse cursor to select one or more files and drag them to the new folder. Hold the CTRL key down to copy. See how the little plus sign appears? That signifies a copy. Moving a file means removing it from one folder and placing it in another. Only one file exists, so there's no need for the copy machine here. Just like with copy, you can move files on a computer in several ways. Dragging and dropping between folders on the same drive defaults to Move. Here, I'm moving some photos of a trip to London. from pictures to the London Pics folder. See the little arrow on the icon? That signifies a move. Let's take a look. Hey, I missed one. You can also right-click a file and select Cut from the Context menu. Or press Control plus X on the keyboard. Then go to the desired new location. right-click and select "paste".Or press CTRL + V on the keyboard to move that file. Oh, that's one bad selfie. Let's talk about deleting files. Modern operating systems make a distinction between deleting a file and really deleting a file. What's called a "permanent delete"? When I delete a file, it goes from this filing cabinet to the recycle bin. But that file is still here, still accessible. I can undelete if I so desire. Let's see that in action on the computer.

To delete a file, right click and select Delete,or press the Delete key on the keyboard. This removes the file from the folder and puts it in the Recycle Bin.Let's look at that, too. Remove the recycle bin. And there's my deleted bad selfie file. So how do you permanently delete a file in the physical world? I shred it. No one needs to see this photo again. But on the computer, you can empty the contents of the recycle bin to permanently delete a file. This shreds it. right-click the recycle bin icon and select "empty recycle bin". Or if you have a recycle bin, click the empty recycle bin button. You can also hold the Shift key down on the keyboard and press the Delete key. This bypasses the recycle bin and goes straight to permanent deletion.

Okay, that takes care of creating, copying, moving, cutting, and deleting files. That brings us to one more action to do with files. I want to get my London picks onto anthumb drive so I can share them with a friend. When I plug this in, the computer will see it as a separate drive. And there it is. As a USB three underscore stone in File Explorer. The S stands for Super Talent. That's the brand name of the thumb drive. Copies and moving folders work the same as copying and moving files. So I'm going to put a copy of my London Pix folder on the thumb drive. Do you remember that dragging and dropping between folders on a drive defaults to moving them? Right. You see the arrow icon here’s? An important distinction to make when you draganddrop between two drives is that the operating system changes the default action to copy. See how the plus sign replaced the arrow as soon as I hovered over the thumb drive? And now I have a way to share my London pics. That's manipulation.

3. Backups

It's easy to replace a computer if you have the cache. But what about your personal data? What if the hard drive dies and you lose access to everything it holds? Or what if some meddling kid deletes everything in your Documents folder to clear space for that awesome new game? How bad would that be? Catastrophic Just thinking about it makes me panic. That's why backups are so important. You need to have a backup strategy, including tools and frequency. Pick one or more backup media and verify the backup after it is completed. Let's look at all three. You can backup data manually or use a programme to handle it for you with a manual copy. Launch Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder. Copy the files you want to backup,then paste them to a new location. That works in a pinch, but not really as a long-term solution. Most folks run some sort of utility programme to handle backups. Windows eight and ten have a built-in backup system called file history.MacOS has an excellent time machine for taking multiple snapshots of user documents. You can easily restore deleted files or folders using these tools. Alternatively, you could use an image-based backup system to make a full copy of your hard drive. Try a Chronos True Image. If you want an impressive set of backup tools, you should schedule a backup at least once a month, if not once a week. You can back up to three types of devices using third-party tools: locally attached storage, network attached storage, and the cloud. Most personal backups go to locally attached storage, which is a fancy term for a drive that plugs into your computer directly. That's how file history and time travel work.

Here, I've plugged an external hard drive into a USBport on my Mac and turned on Time Machine. Life is good. Some locations, like an office, provide access to storage that's connected to a local area network. Your business might have a file server, for example, or a NAS that you can use. This is good because if your computer gets stolen or blown up (which happens), you still have copies of your data. For maximum safety, you should back up to a different physical location than where your computer resides. That generally means the cloud. These days, many companies offer relatively inexpensive cloud storage options, such as Microsoft OneDrive or Apple iCloud. You can use robust, high-end storage like Carbonite, but it'll cost a little bit more. Once you've run a backup, make sure it works. Don't wait until disaster strikes and you need to restore files before you test the process. Here's the rule: always verify your back.

4. AMA - Ask Me Anything About Managing Files

I wanted to take some time to hear from you and answer questions you might have on IT fundamentals or computer literacy. So that's why we put together these Ask Me Anything episodes. My friend Aaron is going to ask questions about stuff in this chapter from viewers like you. I also want to hear from you as well. Well, my email is at the end of the episode, so ask me anything. So recently, I was working on a new song. I was writing lyrics in the evening on Notepad on my computer, and the battery went out. My computer crashed. I don't have anything, and I was loving what I was doing. Okay, all right, well, a couple of things. One notepad, really? Yeah, you'll see, we'll just let that one just go. Recovering your files: there are a couple of things you can do. Well, some programs, like Microsoft Word, will automatically save your documents. So when you are, you do something like, "Oh,no, the power goes out, you reboot your computer." When the power comes back up, open up Word and it'll show a whole list of recovered documents.

So maybe not every word that you typed, but the last 30 seconds before your computer died, so you at least have something to go back to with other programmes like Notepad. If you don't save, it just vanishes, right? Because everything is stored, everything works in Ram. You remember that from chapter two, or whatever it was. Everything is stored in RAM or is running in RAM, but that's volatile memory, which means it needs power to be able to save anything. And so if you haven't saved time, right. A really good habit to get into is just control-command-s, which is the key combination to save your data. And it's a good habit to be in,especially if you're writing things in Notepad. Yes, I'll try to remember that. I will use the word next time. Jude from Boulder, Colorado asks: I renamed a file and lost it. What's an easy way to find a missing file? It's a good question. File Explorer in Windows and Finder on MacOS are both really powerful tools for being able to sort through your data. If you know what folder that you saved your file in, even if you don't remember the name of the file, you can sort by date. So if you know that yesterday was the day you worked on your file, just click Sort by Date and everything will show up. So you find, like, oh, I named it that. What? That's crazy.

If you don't remember the folder that you sorted it in,both Windows and MacOS do what's called indexing, which means they keep track of or catalogue all the files and folders on your system, not just by name or date or by author,but also by the contents of that file. So if Jude was writing the greatest American novel ever, it starts out that it was a dark and stormy night. He can put those words in the search function in the Finder or in File Explorer. And it might take a few minutes because the operating system is going to go through everything on the drive and the storage, but it'll turn up with that file. Oh, nice. Yeah, very powerful tools. great. There you go, Jude. Next is Mindy from New York wants to know what hotkeys are and when I should use them. Hotkeys are combinations you can use on the keyboard to do things both in the operating system and in applications. Every operating system enables you to do some things right. For example, in Windows, if you have a bunch of windows open, a bunch of applications and stuff, and your boss walks around the corner and you're really playing solitaire and you don't want them to see, you can just press the Windows key and the D key on your keyboard, windows key, and it'll just drop all of those open applications.

It will just drop onto the desktop. Nice. And you can just toggle it right back by hitting the Windows key D again and they'll all come right back up. very nice. MacOS has its own thing as well. Every Mac application has Anything, right? If you want to print something, you hit the Apple key, press the Apple key and P, and it'll go to whatever the default printer is. Okay, so very cool stuff. Applications will also have hotkey combinations. These enable you to do stuff like when you're typing in Word and you're totally on a roll. You know, I'm typing 150 words a minute. I don't really type that fast, but I'm typing away and I don't want to stop. Right. But I want to bold, italicize, or underline some text. We can do it in a couple of different ways. You can go to the mouse and take your hands off the keyboard, go to the mouse scroll,go up, click the B key, right? And then come back to the keyboard. You can also be typing, typing, typing in control or command B and you bold because you know the hotkey combination. So it makes it faster to do what you're trying to do on the keyboard. The applications, this gives you real questions like, how do you find out how to yes?

How do I find that? Right. In applications, they'll often like when you go to the mouse and go up to the right. to make a bold statement If you look at the popup, yeah,the little pop-up text, that's right. That's exactly right. A little pop-up text comes up. It'll go control or command. Right. So, yeah, it tells you. Or you can do a search in the help functions for the application and that will come up with hockey combinations. Or you can google it. Google, of course. Okay, great. Next is a story from Han in Indianapolis. I'm an editor at my college's newspaper, and my classmates are always saving their rough draughts in weird places on our network. Then they try and call me to walk me through where to find their Word document. I always get lost. Is there an easier way to find their files? Yes, absolutely. In File Explorer Finder, you can tell your writers to go to the address bar, which is up near the top. If they click it, it'll give them the entire file path, which says whichfile, which folder, or which subfolder, etc. It's automatically highlighted just like control C or command C. Depending on whether you're on a Windows or Mac. The OS will copy that file path, put it in an email, and send that file path to you directly. And then you'll always know where to find their files elsewhere. great. This is very useful information, especially for you. Han And that's it for chapter eight. Thank you, Scott. Well. Thank you, Erin. And thank you all. Ask me anything.

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