Essential Tips for Your Documents Folder

Your life is in your my documents folder. All that you are is there including your pictures, music, important documents, etc. What amazes me if this is the most important part of the information on your computer why are some people so careless with it? Something that is difficult to replace it would seem you would take steps to keep it safe and secure. In this article I will offer some tips that you can use in managing your documents folder.

Organization

This is probably one of the most most overlooked since we are talking a computer. If it was a file cabinet you would file things away in nice and neat orderly fashion. Well think of your documents folder as one big file cabinet. How are you going to find something quickly if its not filed properly? Making sub-folders and proper labeling of file names will save you a big headache down the road. When a file is labeled properly you don't have to open it to see what it is. Therefore, if it's something you need to keep for a short time or long time you will be able to know how to treat it. Your use of file names and types should be consistent. What a lot of people do is to just label a file by date. That makes no sense cause you have to open it to see what it is. If you don't need a file or folder anymore get rid of it. Keeping it just takes up space.

Downloading files

Do not download files off the Internet directly to your documents folder. Always download files in another location on your hard drive that is specific for that reason. If you by chance ever got a virus or a corrupted file you wouldn't want it to damage anything that is important to you. Being a technician for many years I had witnessed many horror stories of lost data do to viruses that were accidentally downloaded into the documents folder. Don't always rely on your virus checker use a little common sense.

Protection

Another trick is you can take any file and change its attributes to read-only. This is accomplished by right clicking on a file and selecting read-only in the files attributes. That way if its very important it cannot be overwritten. You just need to be careful not to use it on a file that changes every week. Most folders you create already start out with this attribute turned on. Changing a file to read-only doesn't mean it cannot be deleted it just means it cannot be overwritten.

Some files and folders

A quick word about some files and folders you may find in your main documents folder. Some applications including some games like to keep information and stats in their own folder. This is natural and won't hurt anything. They should be in their own little folder and clearly identified. Just to let you know if you remove these than any information or stats that are kept may be lost. Electronic Arts does this with their sports games and it stores your personal profile stats you make in the game.

Backup

Last but not least if you want to be sure never to lose your data than back it up. With all the backup media sources we have today its easier than ever to accomplish this. Its your data its better to be safe than sorry.