Chapter 28. Understanding Drives, Folders, and Files
Beginners and casual users are often thrown by terms like drive, folder, file, icon, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and so forth. Virtually every resource you turn to assumes that you already know what these things mean. Nobody ever bothers to explain them. That's because these terms and concepts have remained unchanged for the past 25 years or so.
Of course, just because those terms have been around for a long time doesn't mean they're common knowledge. In fact, for every person who does know what those terms are about, you can be sure many thousands don't. So in this chapter, I'm going to break from the tradition and explain what those terms mean.
Understanding Disks and Drives
Computers work with information. That information has to be stored on some type of medium. These days that medium is most likely to be in the form of a disk or a card. You can also store information on tape, but tape is used primarily for backup.
Your computer's hard disk
All the programs and information that's in your computer is actually stored on a disk. You never see that disk because it's inside a sealed case. That disk goes by many names including hard disk, hard drive, and fixed disk.
Essentially all of the data you work with, with the exception of information you browse to on the Internet, ...
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