Windows operating system file manager directory system example.
(click on thumbnail images for enlargements)


Here is an example of how to effectively store and file projects on your Windows computer so you can find your projects later and have some organization. As I have some 10,000+ models, documents, spreadsheets, and photo collections on my computer, being organized is critical.

1) Right click on the Start button and a pop-up window will show some choices the one we are concerned with here is the "Explore" option. Click on that.




2) Here we see the explorer window pop up. In earlier versions of Windows this was known as the "file manager" a far better name. For very poor reasons Windows decided to merge the "file manager" and the "internet browser" into something called the "internet explorer" and confuse everybody. They are both the same program, but the program can function in two modes, I refer to the explorer looking at the internet as the "browser" and the explorer looking at your hard drive as the "file manager" to [try at least to] avoid confusion. In this next slide I turn the file manager view to show the details of the files, this is extremely helpfull, that is why Windows OS turns it off by default:




3) In the next slide I show other settings that should be set in your file manager. These steps (and the above) should only have to be done once. You'll want to turn on and off various settings so that you can actually see the files that are on your system and the names these files actually have. Again very usefull information and again in Windows OS designers usual warped sense of logic, these are normally turned off. They prefer to have users distinguish files by a ridiculous set of icons that resemble egyptian Hieroglyphic's rather than let the user see the file name such as pictures.zip or pictures.jpg (where the ".zip" tells the user that it is a zip file versus the ".jpg" tells the userthat the file "picture.jpg" is a picture in jpg format.)

Reset the check boxes as shown and then finish by pushing that "Apply to all folders" button. And your file manager will be a indensible tool.




4) In the next slide we can see some of the organization I've already done on the hard drive of my computer and the new backup folder I'm about to create. On the left hand side you can see the tree view of the hard drive (you may have to turn this on as well with the View --> Explorer Bar --> folders option, I won't bother complaining about Microsoft engineers anymore.) You'll see I created a folder called "Jon" were I keep all of my stuff. This is good place to start, as if you have several people that use the PC you can keep your stuff separate from theirs. I then made a sub-directory under jon\ called "dl" and under that many more sub-directorys further labeling various projects. This helps when I want to find something or use the search faclility.

By right clicking on the right hand side I bring up a pop-up menu that allows me to make a New folder, click on those:




5) and rename the new folder to something significant. Here I'm getting ready to backup the egiftshop so that is what I'm going to name the sub-directory:




6) at this point, I double clicked on the new folder "elten_backup" and the right hand side of the file manager window appropiately shows me the contents of that empty folder. I can now drag and drop, create, move, or use programs like httrack to populate the folder "elten_backup" with files and of appropriate sub-directories.