How Your Devices Organise their Files
Understand this to make using your computer a lot easier
You know that feeling when you go into a friend’s kitchen and have no idea where anything is, and something as simple as getting a glass of water turns into a treasure hunt?
If you find yourself struggling to navigate your computer, you may have the same issue; not understanding how the computer organises things in its storage. Except instead of the “things” being cups and plates, its programs you forgot you downloaded and pictures you took at an event 6 years ago for keepsake and have never looked at again.
In this article, we’ll break down how things are structured inside your storage, and how that translates to what we see on the screen so that you can better navigate your devices.
Here's a quick primer if you’re unfamiliar with the physical parts that make up a computer. The knowledge can come in handy for this article.
The first thing you should find in a computer’s memory
The first thing a computer needs in its memory is an operating system. These are instructions for how the computer should work, including how it organises its files and programs, how it runs things, and what it shows us on the screen when we turn the computer on. The most common operating systems are Windows and macOS. We won’t look at the differences between them in this article, but rather at the common high-level concepts among them.
How we fill up the rest of the memory
We can categorise the things stored in memory into 2 areas: folders and files. A file is any group of data which we see as a single entity, such as a picture, video, word document, etc. Every file must have a name, which comes with a dot in the middle. Everything before the dot is the name, and the letters after the dot are called the file extension. They describe the format of the file.
“Report.doc” tells us that the file is a word document called “report”, while “flower.jpg” tells us that the file is an image called “flower”.
Folders are like boxes; they are used to organise the files on the computer. Folders can hold files and even other folders. They also have names, but no file extensions.
How the folders come arranged on a computer
Usually, your computer will make a main folder for you. It is often referred to as the root directory, and the folder name is your username*. All your files and folders will then be inside that folder. Typically, the computer will create some standard folders for you, like Downloads, Documents, Desktop and Images. You can then create your folders as well.
*Windows computers have a folder called “users” which stores this username folder.
You can see this structure in your file explorer (called “finder” if you’re using an apple device).
Downloads — When we download a file from the internet (such as a picture), our computer takes a copy of that file from the server to its storage. If you don’t know what a server is, here’s a 5-minute intro to the internet. Anything you download from the internet onto your device will go into the downloads folder by default.
Desktop — Anything in this folder will be shown on your computer's home screen (shown in the first screenshots in the article).
Documents, pictures, music, movies — folders to help you organise files that you create. You don’t have to use them, but they could be a good way to categorise some of your files.
What about the programs I run on my computer?
A program is a collection of files. When you download a program like Microsoft Word from the internet, you’re downloading the files it needs to run. The program has an icon we can click to run the software, and in the background, it makes use of those files to operate as we expect.
These files are stored in different places on different operating systems; on Mac, there is an Applications folder which holds them, while on Windows you can choose where to install it; the default is in a folder called “Program Files”.
We don’t see these files and folders when working with the program; instead, we see the icon we click to launch the program. This icon (sometimes called a shortcut) is also a file, which acts as a link. Since it’s a file, this means we can also put it in different places (such as the desktop folder so we can quickly access it).
An example scenario to bring it all together
Let’s go through a real-life scenario from start to finish to see how this all comes together. Imagine downloading the Microsoft Word program from the internet, then opening it and creating a word document to save. You also download a picture of a graph which you want to put in this report.
- The computer gets the Microsoft Word program files from the internet and makes a copy on its storage.
- It creates a shortcut to the program for us on our desktop.
- We download the graph picture, which defaults to our downloads folder.
- We click the Word shortcut, which uses the program files to open the word editor.
- We create our document then click Save.
- We are asked where we’d like to save this document, and what we’d like to call it.
- We choose a folder such as documents, and we name it “report”.
- The program will create a .doc file in the documents folder, which we can access through our file explorer.
- We can then add our photo to the file, which creates a copy of it in the report.
If you’re still here, thank you for sticking around! I hope this article helped you feel a bit more comfortable navigating your computer. If you found this helpful, follow Technology Simplified for weekly articles which make your tech more accessible.
