Department of Geography Computer Labs

Managing Your Files and Directories

The Department of Geography has more than 300 users sharing disk storage. If you fill up a hard disk to capacity, you affect not only yourself but many others. Keeping your files and directories organized from the first day you have an account in the Department will help ensure you know where all of your files are and will prevent mixing of files from different projects in the same directory. This is especially important if you are using ESRI software such as ArcGIS.

In addition to keeping your files organized by creating folders (Windows term) or directories (Unix term), you need to be aware of file security. Files can have different levels of security set depending on what you want to accomplish. For example, your web site files require that permissions be set so anyone (the world) can view the files. But..... you don't want the world to be able to alter the files, just view the contents. On the other hand, if you have a confidential file, an exam for example, you want to set file security so only you, the file owner, can view or alter the file.

File and directory permissions can be set in the Windows environment or Unix environment but there have been situations reported where setting correct permissions in the Windows environment has not worked (click here for info about Samba, the program that allows Windows PCs to access Unix home directories).