What are a file, a folder, and a drive, and how do they relate to each other?

Answer 1

Hmmm I will try to relate this to normal files and drives and such that you will find in your office.

Let's think of the drive as you filing cabinet, in which you can put everything you need to store in there. Your filing cabinet is only so big and can only hold so many files before its full (relate this to the size of your computer hard drive and how it can only hold so much before it fills).

A folder is much like a folder that you will put in your filing cabinet. It will hold all the files, papers, letters that you want it to hold. So you might have a folder titled "taxes" and put all your receipts in there to help organize. This is what folders on a computer are, they allow us to organize or mess of documents so we don't have to have them all in one spot.

Files are like the documents that you may have in an office. Some of them might be for pictures, some letters, some for music. These are the actual things that you need for information/entertainment. You will put these in files on a computer to organize them, much like you would put documents in different sleeves when you place them in your filing cabinet.

Answer 2

A drive is the physical devise where a file in a folder is stored.

A folder is a storage unit for containing a file.

A file is the document or picture that is stored on the drive.

Think of the drive as a file cabinet.
Think of the folder as the folders inside the cabinet.
Think of the file as all of the documents being inside the folders of the file cabinet.

Answer 3

A drive = a hard drive, it is a rectangular box that holds several high density magnetic disks in a sealed environment so it can hold a lot of data.

A folder = A spot where data and programs are filed on. They appear on the hard drive in the hard drive's sectors.

A File = those individual programs and data collections (like a document, a list, a Power Point Presentation etc.)

So how does this all come together?
First just like your VCR (Video Cassette Recorders) a hard drive uses magnetic media to store data. You hard drive is actually a stack of those old disks that programs used to be stored on. Each disk is circular with magnetic sections on both sides. Information is recorded in binary code (1s and 0s) magnetically. Each tiny section has either a N-S or S-N or orientation that orientation tells if the section has recorded a 1 or a 0.

In a hard disk the drives are sealed so that very little dust or smoke can get inside. A particle of smoke or dust would seem like a boulder to the head that reads the information. The heads travel in and out while the disk spin. These disks inside the hard drive are called platters.

A computer formats a new drive so it can use it. It creates little sectors think of them as sets of bookshelves in a library. The sectors are empty, but are needed so you can put your data there and the computer can come back and find it. As you add programs or data to the hard drive then it is all written in the sectors. Think of putting books on a bookshelf with a book being on file, program, or collection of data.

To find all this the computer writes a FAT (File Allocation Table) to organize the sectors and tell the computer where all the data is. Think of the FAT as the card catalog for the library. You need this card catalog to find a specific book since you can’t read the titles of the books very well.

When you send a program to the recycler bin it remains in its exact place on the hard drive so you can restore it if you need to. When you empty the recycler bin nothing happens to the actual program, it remains unchanged. However, the FAT loses the directions to the sectors where those files lay. It would be just like taking out some cards from the card catalog file; the books are untouched, but you can’t find then since you can’t read the titles on the books. There are some programs that can go into the files and read those titles, but the can only do it one at a time. Normally when the FAT entry is lost the file is lost.

When new data or programs are added to the hard drive they are written down in sectors that the FAT thinks are empty. So it will write over your old data and programs. This is the only way to permanently remove information on a computer. To do this the DOD (Department of Defense) has a program that rewrites blank data across the hard drive. DOD standard is to rewrite that data 50 times. After that the data or programs (the files) are over written so many times that it would be almost impossible to retrieve any data from them.

Therefore your programs and data are written to the HARD DRIVE and stored in SECTORS the computer remembers where that data is in the FILE ALLOCATION TABLE. The collections of programs and data are stored in FOLDERS in a group of sectors. While a subset of those sectors hold the FILES.

So what happens if the FAT is lost or damaged? Then you lose your data. If the FAT is lost the library’s card catalog is tossed into the garbage and no book can be found. So the computer has to be reformatted. If you don’t have your data backed up on a CD, DVD, Tape Drive, or another hard drive then you will lose it.

When a computer formats a hard drive it rewrites the sectors and ignores all the data written on the drive. This would be like taking down all the bookshelves in a library and tossing all the books outside in the dumpster. Then once you reassemble the, now empty, bookshelves a garbage truck comes and empties your dumpster. The data is gone forever and you will never be able to find it again. So if your computer wants to format a drive then you are starting from scratch and you will lose all that data.

Answer 4

A drive is a physical storage device or partition (part of a physical storage device) that contains both files and folders. Thumb drives, when inserted into a computer, are their own drive. Your computer's hard drive is generally called the "C" drive (for "Windows" PCs). Both of these can hold data and contain a file structure which is segregated by folders.

A file contains data. An example would be a text document since it contains the data you created/typed. In other words, a file is an encapsulation of data on a physical storage medium. A folder is a subdirectory to store data in. You can organize files in folders to make it easier to find them.

For example:

C: is your "main drive". In your C: drive you have:

C:\My Stuff\
C:\WINDOWS

The Windows folder contains your operating system files. The My Stuff folder is probably a folder you created to store data (files) in.

You could organize your items like this:

C:\My Stuff\2006\January\calendar.doc
C:\My Stuff\2006\February\calendar.doc
C:\My Stuff\2006\February\vacation.txt
C:\My Stuff\Downloads\CoolGame.exe

The two calendar.doc files may be the same file or separate files since they are stored in two different locations. Most likely they are separate and relate to their folders before them, one being in January and one being in February of last year. Finally the .exe is another file that is known to many as an executable which can be ran on Windows based machines. This one happens to be a game.

Hope this answers your question.

Answer 5

A drive is where your hard drive or Cd or some sort of storage device is found at. A folder (directory) is located on a drive in some type of order, a file is one of one or one of many that contribute to the folder of topic.

drive C:
folder example: budget:
files example: grocery cost, gas cost , rent or mortgage payment or any file that has something to do with your budget can be filed.

Answer 6

Drive- the storage media usually associated with an letter

Folder, an container located in the drive ( possibly located within another folder)

File, the final destination or the smallest part

Answer 7

File can go in a folder which you can save on a drive. They're all related to computer memory and storage.

Answer 8

A file is an item you have saved on your computer, like a document you created and saved as "myfile.doc" or "myfile.wpd" or whatever word processing program you used to create it. Or a spreadsheet that you saved. Or anything at all. A folder is a directory that you (hopefully) keep like files in. You may have a folder containing all your letters, or address lists, or whatever. A drive is the computer disk that stores all your folders and files.

In computerspeak, it is as follows:

C:\ -- that's your "C" drive

C:\Addressbook -- "Addressbook" is your folder

C:\Addressbook\MrsJones -- "MrsJones" is the file stored in Addressbook on your C drive that has Mrs. Jones' address.

Answer 9

A file resides in a folder and the folder resides on the drive (or disk).

Answer 10

ok so you have your computer, then inside that theres a spinning disk called the hard drive. that has all of the info on your comp on it. the hard drive is split into data drives (mainly C and D, other letters come like your cd drive, usb...) that holds less info than the hard disk (duh) but its still a lot, cause the C drive has most of the info in it...in the C drive, you can further organize data into folders. then comes the file. thats like your word document, or song, or movie...thats usually the smallest bit of data you see.