Your Computers Filing System - Understanding How The Computer Saves Files

Understanding how you computer files things can be frustrating to say the least. Sometimes you try to open a file and it doesn't open up to the right folder. Sometimes you save something but can't remember where you put it. If the filing system your computer uses is a mystery to you, here is help!

The first thing to do is understand how your filing system works.

Just for a minute, imagine a filing cabinet. The filing cabinet has a top to it. It also has drawers. Inside the drawers are folders. Within the folders you can have more folders and individual documents or files. That is easy enough to understand! Right? Your computer filing system is no different than that.
Let's call the top of the filing cabinet "Desktop".
We will call the filing cabinet "My Computer".
We will call each drawer by a letter.
   Letter "A" will be the floppy drive.
   Letter "C" will the hard drive.
   Letter "D" will the CD-ROM drive.
*Your drives may be named differently if you have more than one hard drive.

For each letter or drive you have folders that can hold more folders and individual files or documents. You can call these folders anything you want.

With your computer the folders are visualized by showing folders inside of folders. In the example to the left, you can see your desktop, then "my computer" with the drives that are in "my computer". In drive "A:" there is a main folder. Inside of that folder is three sub folders. Inside of Sub Folder #1 there are another two sub-folders. If you are looking in "Sub-sub Folder #2" you would have to go up two levels to get to the "Main Folder". To open a folder and see what sub-folders it contains, you just click on the little plus sign next to the folder. To close the folder you just click on the minus sign. This is called expanding and contracting the file tree.

NEXT... Opening Files
Page 1 - Understanding Your Filing System
Page 2 - Opening Files
Page 3 - Finding Lost Files
Page 4 - Creating, Renaming and Moving Folders
Page 5 - Organizing Your Files

More Filing System Help
File Sizes Explained

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