Zoomer here, and I do indeed have questions about computers- how do filesystems work, and why should we care (I know we should, but I'm not exactly sure why)?
So why should we care?
You need to know where your own files are.
I've got a file on a flash drive that's been handed to me, or an archival data CD/DVD/Bluray, or maybe it's a big heavy USB external hard drive and I need to make a copy of it on my local machine.
Do I know how to navigate to that portable media device within a file browser?
Where will I put that data on my permanent media (e.i. my laptop's hard drive)?
How will I be able to reliably find it again?
We'll cover more of the Why and How, but this will take some time, and a few addendum posts because I'm actively hitting the character limit and I've rewritten this like 3 times.
Let's start with file structure
Files live on drives: big heavy spinning rust hard drives, solid state m.2 drives, USB flash drives, network drives, etc. Think of a drive like a filing cabinet in an office.
You open the drawer, it's full of folders. Maybe some folders have other folders inside of them. The folders have a little tab with a name on it showing what's supposed to be in them. You look inside the folders, there are files. Pieces of paper. Documents you wrote. Photographs. Copies of pages from a book. Maybe even the instruction booklet that came with your dishwasher.
We have all of that here, but virtualized! Here's a helpful tree structure that Windows provides to navigate through all of that. In the case of Windows, it's called Explorer. On OSX MacOS, the equivalent is called Finder.
I don't have to know where exactly everything is, but I have a good idea where thing *should* based on how I organize them. Even things that don't always expose the file structure to you have one (like my cellphone on the right). I regularly manually copy my files off of my cellphone by going to the Camera folder so I can sift through them on a much bigger screen and find the best ones to share. There are other reasons I prefer to do it that way, but we won't go into that here. Some people prefer to drag and drop, but that doesn't always work the same between operating systems. I prefer cut and paste.
Standby for Part 2!
