Where's Your Stuff?

by Bob Seidel

I meet many kinds of PC users in my consulting travels. People with very different backgrounds and very different PC experience levels. I am sure that there are many PC users that don't require my kind of services at all, and on the other end of the spectrum there are many users that are almost beginners. But I do see a common issue and it is disturbing me a bit. What set me off was a column in the local daily newspaper about those portable USB "thumb" size storage devices. The column said how handy they were, but neglected any discussion of how to actually use them.

The author was probably justified in this, as the use of these devices is actually very straightforward and logical if you have a certain amount of PC background. You actually don't treat them any differently than you would a floppy disk or a Zip drive. But therein lay the issue: Most people don't know where there stuff is, and don't know how to use the built-in facilities of Windows to move or copy it to the device. I find that this problem is almost universal and spans almost the entire range of clients that I visit. So, let's try to jog you into learning something about it.

Before we start, I should caution you that this column is not, and cannot be, a tutorial on the subject. That would take too much space, and could even fill a book. I am just trying to make my readers aware of the issues.

There are two things you need to know: Firstly: Where is your stuff? Secondly: How do you move or copy it to a different place?

Knowing where you stuff resides on your hard drive is often not easy to determine. That is because many programs think that "ease of use" is hiding from you the details of files and folders. Many programs make up their own terminology for these things - photo-editing programs are often guilty of this. Microsoft sometimes hides its stuff in obscure places; your email and address book are examples. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer here - you have to work with each of your key programs to determine where it stores its data. If you are using Quicken, there is a backup procedure (File / Backup) and you can specify where the backup files go. For Outlook Express, click Tools / Options, then the Maintenance tab and click the Store Folder button. And so on.

If you want to make your backup procedure easier, you can often change the location that programs use to store their data. I try to allocate folders under My Documents for all of these things, and then my backup becomes much simpler as I just have to backup My Documents and I know that all the various program data files are being backed up.

The next issue - how to move and copy files - should be in the tool caddy of every PC user. You need to know how to create folders, search for files, and move or copy files. You should know how to list the contents of a folder, and how to search down through the hierarchy of folders to find what you want. The answer to how to do these operations is simply to understand how to use the built-in Windows Explorer program. You can get to Explorer by right clicking on the Start button and selecting Explore. Moving files is done via drag-and-drop.

Again, a full tutorial of using Explorer is beyond the scope of this column. My intent was to familiarize you with the issues, and urge you to get some help is both understand your applications and in how to manipulate your data. Once you know where your stuff is, and how to use Explorer to move it, using one of those USB thumb drives is a snap!

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).