From the course: macOS Monterey Essential Training

Understand essential folder structure, including the Home folder - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Monterey Essential Training

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Understand essential folder structure, including the Home folder

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- [Tutor] Before you store and organize your own files, it's important to understand the folder structure that already exists in macOS so you can work within that organization. I need to open a finder window. So I'll click the finder icon in the doc, and I want to go to my main system drive. And if you do not see the Macintosh HD listed here in the sidebar, just make sure you refer back to the first video in this chapter. When I select that, I'm looking at the root level of my main storage drive. And in this case, I see four folders. On your drive, you might have more, but you should at least see these four. Everything on your storage drive is inside of one of these folders. Now, the library folder and the system folders are really easy. Most users have no reason to ever open these folders and I include myself in this. Moving or deleting files in one of these folders, can cause problems with your computer. So I stay out of them. The applications folder is interesting. So I'll double click to open that up. And this is where the applications or programs on your computer are stored. This is important, but we'll spend time with this in a different video. So I want to take a step back, I'll click this back button, that's the one pointing to the left up here in the toolbar, and I'm back to the main root of my storage drive. And that leaves us with the user's folder. So let's double click to open that. And here you will find a folder with your name on it or an abbreviation of your name. This is called the home folder, and it's where all of your personal files should be stored. Now, if you have more than one user accounts set up on your computer, each user will have their own home folder, and you cannot see the contents of another user's home folder, unless you sign into their account. See how useful user accounts can be? Let's open up my home folder, the one with my name on it. I'll double click on that. And what I see inside of that folder are these default folders that are set up by the computer, inside of each home folder to store your stuff. These are pre-made for the different types of files that you might have, like documents, movies, pictures, and so on. Now you don't have to use these folders, but using them this way keeps things much cleaner. Now there's a very important note here. At this point, if you do not see your desktop and documents folders in this location, that is because of a setting related to iCloud. Let's look at that setting. I want to go to system preferences. So I'll go to the system menu, to system preferences. I know I'm signed into an Apple ID because I see my name up here at the top. And when I click Apple ID, I see my account information. On the left, I want to make sure iCloud is selected. So I am signed into iCloud, and I want to see this iCloud drive option, it is enabled. I see the check mark next to it, but we need to click this options button. And I'm really interested in this first line here. If you use iCloud drive, and if this option is set to store your desktop and documents folders in iCloud, then you will find those folders in a different place. If we go back to finder, if it's set up that way, you can select the iCloud drive over here on the left, and you will need to use the desktop and documents folders in that location. This is explained more in the iCloud essential training course, and it is your choice, but of course, it's really important to know where those folders are located. All right, let's click the back button to take a step back to my home folder again. And because I do not have that option enabled in iCloud settings, my desktop and documents folders are here. And at this point, if I open up my documents folders, you see I have several folders that I created or copied to my documents folder. I actually set up these folders earlier in the video on using the exercise files. So if you followed along in that video, you might see the same thing here, or you might just see your own documents, which is great. You should not feel obligated to use the same exercise files that I have. All right, let's take a step back again to my home folder. And you should know that some applications, save content in these folders automatically. So if you use the photos application in macOS, it saves your photo library in this pictures folder. The music application saves your music library in the music folder. And one thing that really helps me understand this folder structure, is the fact that I turned on the path bar in another video in this course. If we go to the view menu, you can hide the path bar or show the path bar, so you can know exactly where you are and how you got to this location. I went to my main storage drive, into a folder called users, and then into the folder with my name on it, that's my home folder. So you can see where your home folder is located in your drive's organization. Later, when you do start storing your own files or making new folders, I strongly encourage you to use these folders as intended.

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