Learn how the Mac’s folders are structured.
In this lesson for macOS on the Mac, I look at the folder hierarchy of macOS Mojave. The better you understand how your Mac is organized, the easier it will be to keep it organized with your files and folders.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
Introduction: Now, let’s take at the folder hierarchy on a Mac. I believe that the better you understand how your Mac is structured and how your folders are structured on your Mac, the easier it’s going to be to keep it organized. Let’s take a look at the folder structure or the folder hierarchy of a mac. Let’s go to my Mac.
Viewing Hard Drives: Now, the first we’re going to do is we’re going to go up to go to the menu bar, and what I am going to do is, I am going to go to my hard drive. I am going to click on ‘Go,’ and now I am going to go to computer. What I am going to be able to do is see all of my hard drives. Let’s go ahead and select it. And here are my hard drives.
What are my hard drives? Well, my hard drives are where my files and folders are stored. Let’s think of an office. When you’re storing papers or folders, you store them in a filing cabinet. Think of a hard drive as a filing cabinet. Now I have multiple hard drives. I have a Drobo; this is an external hard drive. That’s one filing cabinet. I also have my Macintosh HD for my new iMac, which what this computer is here. That’s another filing cabinet in my office, and then I also have my time machine another filing cabinet in my office. Think of each one of these hard drives as a separate filing cabinet. To open up any one of them, all you have to do is just double click on it. Now, let’s open up my hard drive for the mac cause this is what we’re going to focus on, the structure of our Mac. I double click on it, and these are all the files in my filing cabinet.
Applications Folder: Now, this filing cabinet has four draws. We have the first drawer as applications. These are all the different applications on our Mac. This where we want to store our applications.
Library Folder: The next one is our library. This is what Mac OS uses. We want to stay out of the library. We just let the Mac OS manage the library. The same thing with the system; we do not want to get into the system. Mac OS uses the library and the system, we do not want to get into those.
Users Folder: The bottom draw is our users folder. Now, remember how I mentioned that we could have multiple accounts? And the account that you are in is called your home folder Lets go ahead and open up the user folder. Now, the way that I am going to do this is I am going to click on the triangle so we can see how it is structured as I open these up. I click on the triangle, and you’re going to see that I have four different users along with a shared folder.
The user that I am currently logged into is my Mac OS Mojave, this my home folder. I can see that I am in my Mac OS Mojave by going to my menu bar. If I were logged in as Dan Wassink, that would be my current home folder. Now, lets back over to Mac OS Mojave. You saw this in the last video, what folders are in here. When I click on the triangle, what do you think we’re going to see? We’re going to see our applications, desktop, documents, downloads, movies, pictures, and public.
What do you think going to happen when I open up Noteboom Tutorials? What do you think we’re going to see? Well, let’s click on the triangle and find out. Click on it, let’s go on– make this a little larger by clicking on the window. If we look here, we’re going to see I have a lot of the same folders. I have my desktop, my documents, my downloads. If I go over to Dan Wassink, I have my applications; I have my desktop, my documents, and my downloads.
Restricted Folders: But if we look at this, you’re going to see I have a little red circle to the left of the name, it actually on the folder in the lower right-hand corner of the folder. This means that I do not have access to it. Each user has access to their own documents and folders, but they do not have access to other users’ documents and folders. This is why we have a shared folder, anything I want to share I’ll put into this shared folder.
Now I am going to close these. Let’s clean it up a little bit. Now we have our Macintosh HD, which is our filing cabinet. That filing cabinet has four drawers. We have our applications, our library, our system, and our users. In the users folder, we have all of our different users. In most cases, you’re just going to have one user because you’re going to have one account on your Mac.
In that user, the home folder, you will have desktop, documents, download, movies, music, pictures, and public, and we can add other folders to this. When I go and open up my documents, I am going to see my documents. I go on open up my music, am going to see my iTunes. Another way of looking at this, let’s go ahead and open up music here. I double click on it, and now when I go up to music here, I am going to be able to reverse or go back in my folder structure. What do you think we’re going to see when I command-click on music here? I have my music folder, which is in my macOS Mojave folder, which is in my users folder, which is in Macintosh HD, which is on my Mac. That’s the folder structure of our Mac.
What we want to do is, we want to keep everything in our user folder. I am going to double click on my home folder here. What we want to do is keep everything in our user or our home folder.
We do not want to access our library or our system. Any applications are going to be stored in the Applications folder. You’re going to notice that I do have two applications folder. I have an applications folder for the user, and then I also have one, let’s go up to Mac OS Mojave and command-click. I also have one for my hard drive. Anything that is in my hard drive here, these applications are accessible by all users. Anything that is in this application is only accessible by this one user, because it is in this home folder. If I put an application in this folder, when I log in as Dan Wassink, I will not have access to any applications here. We can control access to applications by placing them in the applications folder within our user folder or within our hard drive.
That’s the folder structure of the folder hierarchy of our Mac.