The Green Geek - Now where did I put that?

Dear Green Geek, Help!  I often lose things on my computer!   I save a picture from my digital camera and when I come back to my computer, it’s gone! What am I doing wrong?

 

Regards,

Miss Laid

Dear Miss Laid,

 

You are not alone in regards to your frustration. A lot of people who use computers find themselves having trouble finding important files they have previously saved.  In fact, the more you use the computer, the more likely it is you will misplace a file in amongst all that other work you have been doing.

 

“Hey, weren’t computers meant to enable us to find information quickly?” I hear you ask.  Well, yes and no. Accessing a computer file is certainly a lot quicker than walking over to a filing cabinet... but  finding anything, whether it be stored electronically on a computer disk or physically in a filing cabinet is completely dependant upon how and where it was stored.  For example, if you just throw all of your tax records, banking documents, receipts and plant descriptions into a single big box marked “my stuff”, then it is going to take you ages to locate that one Telstra bill you are arguing about.  Just like with a physical filing cabinet, the secret to finding your electronic files is to make sure you save them in clearly labelled folders that have some sort of real meaning. 

 

 

All desktop computers (Apple Mac’s, Microsoft Windows PCs and even Open Source Linux systems) have at least one “disk drive”  and they often have more than one.  From the point of view of filing our documents, you can think of a disk drive as a big steel filing cabinet. On some computers, each separate disk drive is identified by a number (0, 1, 2 etc.)  On other computers, disk drives are identified by letters (A, B, C, D etc.)  On most computers, disk drives can also be given a descriptive name, such as JOESNOTEBOOKPC, which is a drive in my notebook computer.  You should also note that sometimes drives are referred to as ‘volumes’ (although from a hardcore geek point of view, an actually physical computer hard drive can look like separate drives volumes... but honestly, who really needs to worry about that on a day to day basis?) 

 

To make things a little more complex, most computers have removable drives, which are drives that can be swapped in and out of your computer. USB memory sticks, CD-ROMs DVD-ROMs and ZIP drives are all examples of removable drives. No matter how your computer identifies and labels drives (or volumes) they are all for the same things – they let you store and access your information.

 

 

You may create “folders” (which are also known as directories) in your computer’s drives . Folders are pretty much a good name, since they mimic the manila folder you use with a physical filing cabinet. You can place your electronic files into folders to help organise your work and records. 

 

For example, you may wish to create folders called:  “quotes” “invoices”, “plant photos,” “labels,” “customer letters” to store quotes, invoices, pictures of your plants, digital label designs and letters to customers respectively.  

 

Where computer folders differ slightly from their real-world manila cousin is in the ability to place multiple folders inside another folder.  The following diagram shows you how I have arranged my folders:

 

 

At the highest level, you can see I have a folder called My Documents (which is the standard folder for storing documents with Microsoft Windows XP).  Within the My Documents folder I have placed three additional folders for administration, work related files and for my hobbies.  Within each of these three folders, I have created specific folders for my files.  This hierarchical approach (called a tree, because it looks like roots burrowing into the ground) lets you be very specific with where you can place your files.  However, it only works if you are very careful about where your store your computer files in the first place. For example, if I was to save this Green Geek article in the My Documents folder, I would be able to find it... but if I saved all of my files in the My Documents folder, things would quickly become cluttered.  Instead, by placing my Green Geek articles into my Green Geek folder, which is inside my IBRS folder, which itself is inside my Work folder, I can separate all my Greek Geek work from the rest of the mess of my life!

 

 

Choosing the names of your folders and the structure of your folder tree is very important. The rule of thumb is to start with the broadest possible categories and work your way down to specific categories. In my example, I split My Documents  into three main areas that represent my work life: Administration, Work and Hobbies. Since I wear three hats, my Work Folder is split into my three roles: one for my paid IBRS consulting work, one for the work I do with our family business, TyTags, and finally another  folder for my work of passion, my PhD research. At this point – about two to three levels down your tree – your folders should be narrow enough so that you could look at the folder name and know exactly what files would be stored inside.

Organising Plant Photos

 

A terrific use of folders for nursery people is when organising plant photos.  Many nurseries are taking digital photos of their specialist plants with a plan to create their own labels.  However, when most people copy digital photos from a camera to their computer, they just drop them all into the same folder... which gives you a big pile of photos with cryptic names.  It takes an expert to determine what photos is what plant!

 

To make things easier, create a tree of folders to store your plant photos in an organised way.  For example, a rose grower could set up the following structure:

 

 

This structure is simple and follows standard Rose categorization names.  But we can go further. If the grower has hundreds of different types of Hybrid Tea roses, and they frequently get asked to identify roses by colour, we could add several folders within the Hybrid Teas folder as follows...

 

 

Of course, the exact structure of your folder tree is completely up to you. Also, don’t worry too much about its structure from the start.  The one big difference between computer folders and physical filing cabinets is that you can very easily move folders around your folder tree, and rename folders in a flash. You can also quickly drag and drop files between folders. It’s a heck of lot easier than opening and closing big ol’ steel cabinets!

In summary, it is important that you take some time to learn how your computer’s disks and folders are set up, how to add new folders and how to name them. This is the secret to a better organised computer and no more lost files!