Chapter 4
Keeping Your Snow Leopard Organized
In This Chapter
Looking at Snow Leopard’s folders
Keeping your folders tidy
Finding the stuff in your folders
I won’t pretend to be able to organize your Mac for you. Organizing your files is as personal as your taste in music; you develop your own style with the Mac. This chapter provides food for thought — some ideas about how I organize things — and some suggestions that can make organization easier for you regardless of how you choose to do it yourself.
Understanding the Mac OS X Folder Structure
Start by looking at the folder structure of a typical Mac OS X installation. Open a Finder window and click the icon for your hard drive (which is typically called Macintosh HD) in the Sidebar. You should now see at least four folders — Applications, Library, System, and Users.
Within the User folder, each person who uses this Mac has his or her own set of folders that contain documents, preferences, and other information that belong to that person.
If you’re the sole person who accesses your Mac, you probably have only one user. Regardless, the folder structure that Mac OS X uses is the same, whether you have one user or dozens.
Within the Users folder, you find your personal Home folder and a Shared folder, where you can put files you want to share with other users.
All these files are stored in a nested folder structure that’s a bit ...
