Working with Digital Files (file storage and retrieval)

2019. Essay for Digital accelerator course

Why do we need to storage our files? To have them for the future safe. It’s easy. But before we find out why do we retrieve our data and how we do it, summarize some information about this topic.

Computer file (data) is a computer resource for recording data discretely in a computer store device. There are several types of computer files, designed for different purposes. File storage (file-level, file-based storage, storage, or storage media) stores data in a hierarchical structure; it is a storage-device. A storage-device is any hardware capable of holding information temporarily or permanently. There are two types of them used with computers. One is a primary one such as RAM, and a secondary one is like a hard drive. The data is saved in files and folders and presented to both the system storing it and the system retrieving it (brings it back) in the same format. But to retrieve them we need to classify them (name properly). It is important we give our folders a structure we can understand, and we can retrieve our data from.

Computer data storage (storage or memory) is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. There are storage spaces for documents, for eg. Dropbox. It is a file hosting service and personal cloud storage service (online backup service) that is frequently used for file sharing and collaboration operated by the American company Dropbox. Inc. It offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.

What does Folder structure mean? After a while we have so many pictures, word documents and videos (data or files) saved onto our electronic device, we need to put them into folders and these folders into other folders, to find them. That’s when we use the hierarchical structure.

This is how my CDP course folder looks like. Every time we start a new session, I print the name next to the number on our computer; this is how I know where and what sort of documents I can retrieve.

File naming

A filename is a name used to uniquely identify a computer file stored in a file system. Different file systems have different restrictions on filename lengths and the allowed characters within filenames. In general, we cannot use 'special characters'. Simplifying it. If, for eg. we use spaces in file names, the chances of an error occurring at some time as a result is increased. The symbol underscore (underline or low dash) is a character that originally appeared on typewriter and was used to underline words. Nowadays the character is used to create visual spacing (within a sequence of characters), where a space (whitespace character) is not permitted: not just compute file names, but e-mail addresses and Internet URLs.

We should get in the habit of not using spaces, dots, and special characters. These are the Punctuations, some of the characters we are not allowed to use in file naming on computer:

# pound

% percent

& ampersand

{ left curly bracket

} right curly bracket

\ back slash

< left angle bracket

> right angle bracket

* asterisk

? question mark

/ forward slash

blank spaces

$ dollar sign

! exclamation point

' single quotes

" double quotes

: colon

@ at sign

+ plus sign

` backtick

| pipe

= equal sign

A good example of correct usage of file naming: project_name_date_v001.pdf

A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free and may be either unpublished or open.

There are as many different file formats as there are different programs to process the files. A few of the more common file's formats are Word documents (.doc), Web text pages (.htm or .html), Web page images (.gif and .jpg), Adobe PostScript files (.ps), Adobe Acrobat files (.pdf), Executable programs (.exe) and Multimedia files (.mp3 and others).

The first file format we are discussing is JPG or JPEG (Joint Photographic (Experts) Group). It supports a range of color 256 colors. JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography and it's safe for and suitable use on the web, mostly storing and transmitting. But it is not as well suited for line drawings and other textual or iconic graphics because its compression method (LOSSY) performs badly on these types of images. Shortly, when we are saving a picture in JPG we cannot start using it in digital graphics program as it would lose its quality. JPG does not support transparency. We are using JPG for photos and pictures on the Internet.

Next File format we can use on the web is P.N.G. LOSS lessLOSSless system, it supports transparency (data compression) and it contains a bitmap of indexed colors . PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). Compared to JPG and PNG, PNG has a better quality (because JPEGs use lossy compression). The more compression that's added to a JPEG the worse the quality. PNG files are commonly used to store graphics for web images, for eg: icons, vector logos.

The third format is PDF (Portable Document Format), a file format developed by Adobe in the 1990s to present documents, including text formatting and images. This file format can be editable, but it is usually Read Only. It is interactive (hyperlink inserted in InDesign) and it embeds images, texts, and fonts. PDF was designed to create transferable documents that can be shared across multiple computer platforms.

The last format is G.I.F (Graphic Interface Format) which supports animation. GIF is used to share video clips or on websites to display animated objects like buttons or header images. You cannot move it into a video-file format, but it would still move; it is a short, animated picture.

Other file formats are BMP (bitmap image file or device independent bitmap is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (for.eg. graphics adapter), especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems), TIFF (Tagged Image File Format is a computer file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, photographers. It is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition, image manipulation, desktop publishing, and page-layout applications). S.V.G. (Scalable Vector Graphics is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation) and the newest file format is HEIF (High Frequency Image Format is for individual images and image sequences. It was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It has 16bit color rather than 8bit color; and it has the same quality of the file, but the half of size of a JPG. HEIF potentially will change our digital world and replace JPG and GIF.)