Tech Sense: Location, Location, Location
Posted by Claudio Caballero in Technology, tags: Technology
They say that in real-estate, location is (at least almost) everything. The same can be said about the files on your computer. To put the issue in a more metaphysical light, if you don’t bother to know where you put something, how can you expect to find it?
When PCs first became available, the concept of location was easy for most users to understand, as there was usually a floppy disk involved, with (theoretically, at least) a label on it. Location was tangible, physical.
Now, we use increasingly large hard drives where we can create a virtually limitless collection of “nested” (one inside the other) folders to store our files in.
Just as it was incumbent on us to label and organize our storage when it was in small physical containers like floppies, it’s even more important to do so now, at least if we want to find our stuff.
When someone can’t locate a file and they ask me for help, nine times out of ten their answer to the question “Where did you put it?” is either “Huh?” or “I don’t know.”
Here’s one common scenario: Someone gets an email attachment and they open it (usually by double-clicking) without saving it in a known location first. They make some edits, then something goes wrong. The power goes out, the computer hangs, the reply email with the edited file doesn’t get sent or saved, etc. Poof…gone.
The way to avoid heartache like this is to NEVER open a file from an external source (email, a web site or application, etc.) without saving it to a location of your choosing first. It usually just takes one extra click (choose Save instead of Open, for instance) to make sure that you know where the file is being saved instead of just relying on the default setting of whichever program you are using.
I’ll end with an example of how crazy it is to do anything else. If you handed a clerk a piece of paper and said “Just file it anywhere,” would you ever expect to find it again?
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