In this lesson, we will learn how to organize files and folders in Mac OS. Everyone organizes their files and folders on their computers as they see fit and there are good ways and not so good ways to do so. In other words, there are best practices to how you organize your files and folders. The first bad practice I see at times is having lots of files and folders on the desktop. And, the reason why this is not a good practice is because the way the Mac OS graphical system works having many icons on the desktop will require significant computer resources. You might not realize it with a few files and folders on the desktop, but the more you add files and folders to the desktop, the slower your computer response time will be. If you are familiar with the spinning beach ball in Mac OS, which is the icon that appears while you wait for your computer to process something, then you might be seeing the spinning beach ball a lot more if your desktop is filled with items. So, as a best practice in organizing your files and folders, please refrain from using the desktop or at least use it as a temporary storage area. Okay, now with that point out of the way, let's discuss the folder structure of a typical Mac OS computer. I'll now open a finder window, then I'll go to the go menu, then I'll choose computer. This will bring up the highest level in my folder structure. Here, I can see my local hard drives, now work items, as well as any external drives that I have connected at the moment. Currently, I have two local hard drives, BS temp, and Macintosh HD, and I don't have anything in networks, meaning no connected servers or resources. I'll double click on my BS temp hard disc, and I see four folders, applications, library, system, and users. These are called top level folders. The applications folder is where you have all your apps installed like Safari, Text Edit, Calculator, and so on. Next, we have the library folder, and that's where we have the shared libraries or files that are necessary for the Mac OS to function properly. Then, there's the system folder which has system files that are also needed for the Mac OS to run properly. And, finally, we have the user's folder. This holds the different home folders for the different users of the computer. Right now, I have two user accounts which are my demo account and my personal user account on this Mac machine. And, inside the demo account folder, you'll find more files and folders. Some are files and folders that I created myself to organize my work, while others are provided for me by default. These default folders are the download folder where files are downloaded by default. Then, there's also movies, music, and pictures. The Mac OS makes these default folders for us, so we can store videos in the movies folder, songs in the music folder, and pictures in the picture folder. This is just a suggested folder structure. And, while you don't have to follow it, it just makes sense to organize your files that way. But, the next question is where do we store regular files like PDFs or text edit files? For that, Mac OS has another default folder called documents. However, I don't see it on my folder structure and that's because I use iCloud. And, if you look at the sidebar, I see iCloud and my iCloud drive and, right under, it is my Documents folder. Typically, the documents folder is a local folder on my computer, but I have set up my iCloud account to keep the documents folder online instead of on my local computer. And, here's where you could find this setting. I go to the Apple menu, then system preferences, then Apple ID, then iCloud on the left. Then, on the right, next to the iCloud Drive, I click on Options. And, at the top, I have checked the desktop and documents folders. This is the option that makes these two local folders not local anymore, but instead they are now under iCloud. And, since I also see desktop, that's another local folder, but now I have it in the cloud as well. Now, someone might ask, if you have the desktop on documents folders in the cloud, why not also the movies, music, and pictures folders? Why are they still on your local computer? The answer is because these are media folders and typically the file size would be large. So, there will be a lag time to download these large files from iCloud down to your local computer so you can use them or update them. And, for that, we keep these files locally on our computer. Alright, so now that we have learned about the folder structure in Mac OS, let's learn about creating new folders, and moving files, and more. I'll go to Finder and open a new window. To create a new folder, we can either go to the file menu, then choose new folder, or we can use the keyboard shortcut of Shift Command N. So, let's click this option and now a new folders created for me in this location, and I'll give it any name. There are many actions now that can be done on the folder and I'll discuss some of the most popular ones. I'll right click on the folder and these menu options come up. From here, I will open this folder in a new tab. So, now you see that the folder has opened up in its own new tab and it's currently empty since I didn't add any files yet. Now, let me go back to the other tab. I'll right click again on a folder and the next option is the remove download. What this option is referring to is to remove this folder from the local machine, but keep it in the iCloud only. So, this video file has a cloud icon with an arrow pointing down. This means that this file is currently in iCloud and, if I want to work with this file, I need to download it first from iCloud. If I right click on the file, I see the download now option or I will just click on the cloud icon to download it. Once it's done downloading, then now I know I have a downloaded copy on my local computer, and, if I right click on it again, now I see the remove download option as it was before. This means that I could remove this downloaded version, but I still have the iCloud copy in the cloud. Okay, let me exit out of this file menu option and right click on the folder once again. The next menu option is the move to trash option. As the name applies, this will delete the folder so I'll click it and now the folder has been deleted. If I realize that I made a mistake, I can go to the edit menu and choose the undo option. And, now, the folder is back again. Now, I'll move it to the trash one more time to show you another way to retrieve the folder after I deleted it. I can now go to my trash and here's the folder I just deleted. I now can right click on it, and choose put back, and we see the folder back again in its rightful place. Let me right click again and go to get info. This opens up a window with all kinds of information about this item, like the size, where it's located in the folder structure, and when it was created, and so on. I'll right click again. And, next option is rename, which simply allows us to rename the folder. Next option is compress, which simply zips up the folder into a smaller zip file so we can save storage space and also send it to someone. Next option is duplicate, which creates a copy of this folder in the same location. It's a much quicker option than to copy the folder than paste it. Next option is make alias which creates a shortcut to this folder. You can think of it as a link or a pointer to this folder. Next option is quick look, which opens up a small window with similar but less information to what we saw in the get info window, like the name, size how many items in the folder, and date it was last modified. Alright, let me close this window now. I'll right click again. And, the next option is copy, which makes a copy in the clipboard so I can paste this folder elsewhere. And, the last option I want to discuss is the share option which allows us to send this folder using multiple options. So, in this lesson, we learned about how to organize our files and folders. Thanks for watching.
