When you're using the Windows operating system,
you may see that drives and files
are accessed with different letters and backslashes
and colons.
You may be trying to figure out what all of this means.
So in this video, we'll look at the different Windows
file structures and paths and how
you would reference those in the Windows operating system.
In the Windows operating system, we reference drives
by a letter between A and Z, and we always
follow those with the colon sign.
So you'll usually see a physical or logical drive reference
with this drive letter followed by the colon.
For example, you may have a floppy drive
inside of your system.
It may be called A colon.
The main storage device on your computer
is usually given the C drive, so it's C colon.
And anything that might be an optical drive
in your system like a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive
is usually called D colon.
These drives don't have to have these particular letters
assigned to them.
You could have any particular letter assigned to these.
And, of course, if you have more than these drives inside
of your computer, you might have an E drive, an F drive, an M
drive, a T drive, or any other letter inside of your computer.
Inside of each one of these drives
is a separate set of files that follows a hierarchy
from the root of the drive all the way through,
with separate files and separate folders.
For example, in your C drive, you
will have many different folders inside of that C drive,
and in each folder you might have a number of files.
This is just like you had a physical file folder,
and you wanted to put different files or different papers
inside of that physical folder.
In the real world, we don't usually
put folders within folders within folders,
but in our operating system that is a completely normal way
to operate.
So you can not only have files within your folders,
you can create trees of folders.
For instance, the Users folder here
has an IE User inside of that.
And this IE User folder has a number
of folders inside of that.
It's a simple hierarchical way that we
can keep track of exactly what's on our system
and allows us to organize things in ways that make sense for us.
When you're looking at these nested folders inside something
like Windows Explorer, you'll see the C colon drive,
and then it simply references user IE User and, in this case,
Favorites.
But if you see this spelled out at the command line,
you might see these separated by backslashes.
So you would see this written as C colon backslash Users
backslash Professor backslash Documents.
And inside of documents is a file called budget.xls.
Inside of the Windows user interface,
we're almost always using our File Manager
to be able to organize and keep track of where files might be.
This really organizes things in a very specific way,
and it's the same regardless of what system you go to.
Here at the desktop, at the very top,
you can see that you have many different items to choose from.
Very common items might be things like the Homegroup,
which you'll see in Windows 8.
But underneath this individual computer,
you have User Folders, there's a Computer folder.
You have Documents, Downloads, and everything
that you might need to access at a glance
from inside of your File Manager.
Underneath this main drive of your computer,
for instance C colon, there are three very important files
that are specific to the Windows operating system.
The first one we'll look at is backslash Users.
This is where all of your User documents will be.
If you needed to back up all of the documents
that you've ever created, you can simply
go to the User's folder and backup everything
that's in that folder.
Another important operating system folder
is one called Program Files.
You'll see this written as backslash Program Files.
And whenever you install an application onto your computer,
it's going to be installed underneath a directory
inside of that Program Files.
And lastly, and perhaps most importantly,
is the operating system itself.
All of your OS files are stored in a folder called Windows.
Some of these are located right off the root
as individual files.
And generally those are hidden from you,
but almost everything related to the operating
system you're going to find inside of your Windows folder.