Jeff Carlson - Take Control of Managing Your Files

Jeff Carlson

Welcome to Take Control of Managing Your Files, version 1.0, published in December 2020 by alt concepts inc. This book was written by Jeff Carlson and edited by Joe Kissell.

This book helps you take on the daunting task of organizing digital files and folders on your devices and teaches you how to effectively organize, locate, and clean up the clutter.

If you want to share this ebook with a friend, we ask that you do so as you would with a physical book: lend it for a quick look, but ask your friend to buy a copy for careful reading or reference. Discounted classroom and user group copies are available.

Copyright 2020, Jeff Carlson. All rights reserved.

You can access extras related to this ebook on the web (use the link in , near the end; its available only to purchasers). On the ebooks Take Control Extras page, you can:

• Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy any subsequent edition at a discount.

• Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading on mobile devices on our Device Advice page.)

• Read the ebooks blog. You may find new tips or information, as well as a link to an author interview.

If you bought this ebook from the Take Control website, it has been added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates.

Managing digital files is a task on any system, but for this book Im focusing on working with Apples Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch products. More specifically, the material covers working in macOS 11 Big Sur, iOS 14, and iPad OS 14, though the features I describe are present in recent versions of the operating systems. Big Sur in particular has a new look and feel from earlier macOS releases, which youll notice in the screenshots, but the functionality is similar. Ill point out differences as they come up.

Also, this book frequently uses path nomenclature to indicate folder locations. If youre unfamiliar with this style, it compactly describes the hierarchy of folders starting at the base (sometimes called the root) level of the computer system, with folders and subfolders added as you read from left to right. The computers internal SSD or hard disk is named Macintosh HD by default (although that can be changed). One important folder at the top level is Users, and inside that is the home folder (bearing your short username) that contains data specific to your user account on the computer. In path form, that structure looks like this:

Macintosh HD/Users/ your-username

In macOS, you access files and folders in an application called the Finder. Most of the files you work with are stored in your home folder; the first two levels (Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD/Users) contain system files and other folders that you rarely need to worry about, so we generally dont mention them. If a path begins with a tilde (~) character, it means the first folder is in your home folder, like so: ~/Documents. To open that folder in the Finder, youd choose Go > Home, and then open the Documents folder. Thats the same location as:

Macintosh HD/Users/ your-username /Documents

To put this into practice: A file that is stored in ~/Documents/Finances/Taxes translates to open the Documents folder in your home folder, and then open the Finances folder inside it, and then open the Taxes folder inside the Finances folder.

In Apples quest to make computers more approachable, filename extensions are (understandably) hidden by default. You may see a text file named Important, but the actual filename is Important.txt. That filename extension is important to macOS, because it identifies the type of file and which app should open it.

In this book, were going to cover some situations where its helpful to see the extension, such as when searching for files. So, I recommend you make them visible: choose Finder > Preferences, click the Advanced button, and select Show all filename extensions.