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POWERtools for novices

Making Your Computer Work for You

File Management

Imagine trying to locate an individual person at UMD knowing only their name. No address, no phone number, no email address, no ID number. Your only recourse is to go from one person to the next until to you find the one you seek. Most of us would refuse this task without some additional location information. Yet many people organize their files on their computers in just this way. They either store them all in one location, or they store them in multiple locations with no idea where tto find them again.

The most important lesson to learn about file management is to plan your file structure. The only incorrect way to do this is not to make a decision. Once your have a storage system set up, then for each file you need to save:

• Know where you store the file.
• Back the file up in a different location.
• Keep multiple copies of the same file consistent.

The exercises in this section will help you to practice these steps.

Exercise 10:

Use the analogy of finding a person at UMD to produce an example file structure to use for the rest of this workshop. Click here for detailed instructions on Exercise 10.

Exercise 11:

Use pencil and paper to plan the ideal file structure for your own files. Click here for some ideas about how to start Exercise 11. When you are finished, show this to the person sitting next to you and explain how you developed it.

Exercise 12:

• Open the file you saved to your desktop earlier and save a backup copy to your diskette. You now have two copies, the original and the backup. Which is which?
• Now make a change to the file, and save it again. Where did you save it the second time? What do you need to do to make your two versions of the file the same? Do this.
• Discuss with the person next to you what you might do to back up an entire directory structure containing all of your files. What happens when your folder structure gets too large to fit on a singe diskette?

Conclusions

Organizing, backing up, and keeping copies of files consistent takes time and self-discipline, but it pays off in several ways:

• A good organization scheme allows you to find things quickly and efficiently. As you store more things on your computer, the time you put into developing your organization scheme pays off with fast look-up capability.
• Computer components do fail, and when your hard drive fails, it is common that all files stored there are lost. If you want to avoid the hassle of remembering to back up your files, consider storing them on a central server that is backed up nightly. Consider getting an account on the Novell office server or using aufs (Mac only) or Samba to store your files on one of our Unix systems.

Even the best file structure can benefit from some routine maintenance. Set aside some time annually (summer is good) to throw out old files and folders, subdivide large folders, or even rethink your high-level folder structure..

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