Understanding your home folder (your user folder) - Mac OS Tutorial

- [Tutor] In a previous movie, we looked at the important concept of folders and files and how this organizational system is used by you and your operating system to manage all the contents of your hard drive. Now it's important to note that many of the folders and files on your computer are not there for your use, they're there in order for the operating system to run properly, in some cases, these files and folders are protected by the operating system, so you'll be unable to move, rename, delete or sometimes even see them, there are files and folders you can move around if you know what you're doing, but can also potentially damage your system, if you don't, that's why your personal account on your Mac includes a Home folder, let's take a look at how to get to the Home folder, before we learn what it is. Currently I don't have any windows open or any applications running, I'm looking at the Mac Finder, you can see the Word Finder here in the upper left-hand corner of the Menu bar, the current application's name is always displayed here and the Finder is basically the application you use to interact with your operating system. So to open my Home folder, I can do a number of different things, I'm going to click the Go menu and here I can select Home, notice there's also a keyboard shortcut listed here, if you like keyboard shortcuts, you can press the Command key, which is the Apple button on your keyboard, Shift and H all together to open up your Home folder, I'll just select it from the menu for now. So the Home folder is your folder, it's where you can store all of your documents, music, photos, videos and so on. Now you can store files on other parts of your hard drive, but there are very few reasons to do that, it's best to keep all of your personal files here in your Home folder, so they're all in one central location. You're also free to create additional folders in your Home folder or within any of these default folders, as your needs require. Even your Mac uses your Home folder to manage the files related to you and the content you store or create with other Apple applications, for example, the Music folder contains the music that you listen to on ITunes and the Pictures folder contains the pictures you manage in the Photos app, the Movies folder contains your IMovie projects and so on. So that's your Home folder, any time you're using an application and you want to save a file, for example, if you're writing a paper and you want to save it, you should navigate to your Home folder and save it for example, in your Documents folder or you might save it into a folder you have nested in the Documents folder, we'll talk about how to save and open files in the next chapter, for now, I just want you to know where you should be storing your stuff on your Mac. Lastly, I want to offer the suggestion of adding your Home folder to the Dock, the Dock is the item at the bottom of the screen containing the icons for various applications, which you can click to open them or make them the active application. Notice this dividing line here in the Dock, items to the left of the line are applications and items to the right are folders, you can customize the Dock with your own application icon and folders. Since you'll probably want to access your Home folder quite frequently, it makes sense to add it to your Dock, so you can always get to it from here, instead of having to click the Finder icon and then choosing Go, Home, like we did earlier. Now to add to the Dock, I first have to find it, now we already have the Home folder open, but let's take a look at where it's actually located, I'm going to close this window by clicking the red Close button, depending on the theme or look you've chosen for your Mac, your buttons might be shades of gray, but that far left button is always a Close button. Now to get to the Home folder for this example, I'm going to choose Go, Computer, the Computer window shows you all the hard drives you have attached to your Mac, unless you changed the name, your main hard drive, the one containing your operating system should be called Macintosh HD, I'll open it by double-clicking it. For the most part, everything you see in here was created by and for your operating system, the only folder you'll probably interact with here, unless you're a more advanced user is the Applications folder, which contains the programs installed on your Mac, I can show you its contents by double-clicking it to open it, so here we have all of my applications. I'll click this left or Back button to go back to the main Macintosh HD window. So that's the Applications folder, now you definitely don't want to mess around with the Library or System folders, if you don't know what you're doing. The other folder in here is Users, I'll double-click to open that, this is where you'll find the Home folder of every user with an account on your Mac, Mac OS is a multiuser system, meaning each member of your household, office or organization can have his or her own account on a single Mac, each user's Home folder and account is protected by their own password, so your files can't intermingle with another user's. Notice I can double-click my own Home folder and you can always tell which one is yours, because your name is on it and its icon is a house and I can see the contents of my Home folder here, but if I click the Back button and try to open, say, this Producer folder, notice each folder in here has a little No Entry kind of symbol on it and if I try to open one, I get this message, so only you or someone with your password can get to the stuff in your Home folder, which is another reason to keep your things in there, rather than somewhere else on your hard drive. Right, let's go back, so I can see my own Home folder again and to add my Home folder to my Dock, I just drag its icon to the right side of the separator line, notice the other icons make room for it and I release my mouse. I'll close this window and now any time I need to get to my Home folder, I just click its icon in the Dock and a menu opens up showing me its contents, I can either browse through this menu and click the folder or file I want to open or I can choose Open in Finder, which opens my Home folder in a window like this again. Alright, so that's the Home folder in Mac OS, again, I highly recommend that you store and organize all of your personal files and other media into your Home folder.