filesystems and how to navigate them

There's this weird phenomenon that many people have noticed in the midst of this technology boom we've been experiencing over the last twenty or so years: many, MANY more people are experiencing personal computing for the first time on a touchscreen device such as a smartphone or tablet over a laptop or PC. I have spoken to many a college professor or otherwise teacher who has said that kids these days don't understand what a file system is, leading me to realize there were only a few years in between the "we had one computer for the entire house in a special room" and the "I have had some form of smart device in my hand since I was old enough to speak" generations.

To be clear! This is not a failing of anyone in particular! This is a consequence of the internet age and the smart device boom. I do genuinely feel that a computer's file system is your best tool for combating the overreliance on the cloud and subsequent harvesting of our data we are experiencing in this day and age.

So. Before I talk about the file system, let me first tell you about the hard drive. Your hard drive is where all of the information on your computer is stored. This includes the operating system, all of the programs you run, and your file system. I won't go into much detail about the different kinds of hard drive you can have in your computer because that's for a different guide. But I feel that it is important to say it here for one reason: your hard drive is NOT the same as the memory in your computer. Memory is short-term storage that helps speed up tasks you're running on your computer (opening a program, playing a game, editing a video, surfing the web). Don't worry if you look at the specs of your computer and think your amount of memory seems really small. Since nothing is stored there long-term, you don't need to concern yourself with the size of your memory. The hard drive space is what is important.

Okay let's get into it!

WHAT IS A FILESYSTEM?

To put it very, very simply: a filesystem is the built-in structure of your hard drive to store all your files on the disk in a way that is easily accessible to you, the user, without having to fuck around with code.

History lesson! Back in the earliest days of computers, we didn't have Start menus or task bars or apps. Computers looked much like the screens of gibberish code you see in movies featuring hackers, capable of only the most basic tasks. As the consumer personal computer market began to broaden developers started to make what computer sickos would refer to as a "graphical user interface" (GUI, often pronounced "gooey"). Colloquially, this is the desktop you see on a personal computer featuring icons, often a Start menu of some sort, and your fun background images. Coupled with this desktop environment the developers started also translating the long strings of code and commands they used to navigate their computer systems into simple buttons that an average user can click (the advent of the mouse proved a huge boon in this regard) in order to easily and quickly access whatever they like.

The speed is the key here. This is a little technical, so feel free to skip it, but I don't want to not include it. The implementation of the file system allocates a specific amount of physical space on your hard drive to files. When you tell your computer to look for a file, by the file system showing the exact location of where it's stored, your computer does not need to scan through the entire drive trying to find which tiny sliver of metal holds your wedding photos or that video you took at a concert. The filesystem stores all of that information on behalf of your computer.

THE BASICS

The way you access your file system is different depending on what kind of computer you use. On Macbooks or Mac computers, you'll access Finder. For Windows and many Linux systems, it will be called File Explorer. File Explorer's icon looks like a swing file folder like papers are stored in. Often when you install an operating system for the first time it's already pinned to your taskbar.

Every file system is structured in a very similar way. The average user, however, will only interact with one major set of folders, so for the sake of this page not being three thousand words of bullshit I'm only going to focus on one of those folders: the User folder. All of your files are located somewhere in your User folder, which is often named something close to your name or perhaps a username. Nested inside this User folder is a set of folders you might be familiar with in passing - or perhaps not. Let's talk about them.

• The DESKTOP folder is the location of all of the icons you might see on your desktop. By default this is any shortcuts to programs you run regularly - on Windows very often if you install a game of some kind it'll ask if you want to make a desktop shortcut. (I'll talk about shortcuts later.)
• The DOCUMENTS folder is a general catch-all for, you guessed it, documents you might have saved.
• The DOWNLOADS folder is generally speaking the default location to save anything that you download from the Internet. The intention is for it to be a short-term location that you would then organize later, but you don't have to use it that way.
• The MUSIC folder is where music goes. Many music apps that look for "local" files will automatically check your Music folder first, before anywhere else. In Windows if you open the Music folder in File Explorer it will usually automatically show you the title, artist, and album of all of your songs contained within it if the file has that information associated with it already. (Most music these days does!)
• The PICTURES folder is for pictures. Like the Music folder, many picture viewer apps will check your Pictures folder first.
• The VIDEOS folder is for videos.

Please note: these are NOT hard and fast rules for file organization. You could store everything on your desktop if you wanted to, and your downloads folder won't automatically delete anything you leave in there. Pictures stored in your Documents folder will still open, and you can still play videos if they're in your Music folder. The computer provides the structure, and it absolutely makes things easier to find to put music in the Music folder and not have a mess of files in the Downloads or Desktop folder, but it's ultimately your call.

HOW DO I KNOW WHAT FILES GO WHERE?

Every file has what's called "metadata" associated with it that tells the computer information about the file. The major things the computer looks at is the address, composed of three parts:

• The "file path", which is the location within the structure of the filesystem where this file can be found. Paths are often expressed with forward slashes denoting a nested subfolder, starting from the hard drive itself and going down.
• The "filename", the unique identifier you, the user, give to a file so that you know at a glance what it is. A filename must be unique within the folder the file is located and certain characters, often associated with the file path, are forbidden for use. (Forward slashes, for example, can't be used in a filename because they'd confuse the computer if they were present.)
• After the filename will be a period and then a little code called the "file extension". This is the key to the whole puzzle - it tells the computer what type of file it is and therefore what program it should use to open it. I have a list of the most common file extenstions here.

It is possible to save a file without a file extension, or to accidentally delete the file extension when renaming a file. This will cause the computer to regard the file as an unknown type, rendering it unable to be opened. This IS, however, fixable! If you remember what kind of file it is, you can rename it by right-clicking the file and selecting "rename", adding the extension back, and hitting ENTER. It will usually allow the file to become "readable" again.