You'll need to leave the itunes pictures and movies where they are if you want to copy them to your ipod and watch them in itunes. You can watch Tivo if the files are in other folders, but they won't appear in the tivo application (you'd watch them by navigating to them and double clicking).

If you want to find all the files of a particular file type, you'd go to the root of the drive in explorer and then click the magnifying glass and search for *.extension (for example *.jpg).

If you have everything in My Documents (and sub folders) it makes it relatively easy to back up all the pictures and movies all at the same time. I think the itunes and Tivo folders are in My Documents already.

My initial impression on reading your post was "Good Grief, Charlie Brown."

I've never been fond of the "Documents and Settings" folder. Just a personal bias. I set up around 20 folders under the "C" drive. What I've found is that as an area of interest expands, it is simplier to segment the subject and create addition folders.

Here's a sampling: Ancestry, Receipts, Shopping, My Files, Cars - Trucks - Equipment, Gardening, Medical, Photographs, State Statutes, Email, Joke Master, Garden and Plants, Phone and Fax, Taxes, Very Important Documents.

My photographs are in folders organized by year. Those are general photographs. Those photograps that relate to a specific subject such as medical or gardens are placed within those folders.

My email is managed upon receipt. It is acted upon or deleted or filed in a folder within the email program. Once a month or so I'll check those folders and save what I want to a folder under the "C" drive as either a text file or and eml file.

The "My Files" folder contains files that are not closely related to any other folders.

When I want to find a file I simply think what subject area would it fall into.

When I determine that a file is used often, I'll place a shortcut on the desk top. I've also got a file on the desktop named "Often". Within that file I've got shortcuts to 20 or so less frequently used files and programs. For example, I like to manipulate graphics so I've got Adobe Photo Deluxe shortcut in that desktop item. I've also got shortcuts to the various files containing cookies, easy to clean them out.

You've got some work to do to get organized.

Post back if you've got questions.

Bob

If you're on a shared computer or in the future add other users or network, the Documents or myDocuments folder is unique to each user and there are some other special reasones and features too for saving files on that path.

If you're the only person to every use a non networked computer then organize however you wish as no one else would ever mess with your files anyways.

I run two hard drives in my desktop, and for the laptop, I partition the drive into two logical drives. I keep the system and most software files on the "C" drive and reserve the "D" drive for data files. Folders and subfolders are created on the data drive as needed. For example, a photo folder might be orgainzed thusly:

Photos:
YR2005.pic
Jan2005
Feb2005
Mar2005
etc.

Another main folder might be, Genealogy:

Genealogy:
Father's surname
Various subjects
Mother's surname
Various subjects

Leave your email software on the C-drive, but you might consider moving the message folders onto the D-drive.

Once all your data files are on one drive, backup is simple. Initially, copy the entire D-drive onto the backup disk. This duplicates the file folders. After this, you may choose to copy the entier D-drive or parts of it to the backup disk. When backing up a single or group of folders, make sure that you copy to the same folders on the backup disk.

When a new folder is added to the D-drive, copy the same to the backup drive making sure that you duplicate the same folder structure.

Bob - Good Grief is right. But it's probably not as bad as it sounds. One of the problems is that before I found this forum a year ago (and had some sense of saving files to the appropriate place), not only did my husband and I just save files (with no regard to where they were being placed) - we also had 2 different computer guys help at various times - and I've discovered that one of them took it upon himself to set up some folders and put items there (he set up a Lynn's documents) when he transferred data from one computer to another. Now I can see why he set up my own folder (since my husband and I shared a computer in those days) - but he never told me he was doing that- so lo and behold - I have an entire Lynn's documents folder that I never use but contains some of my older files. yeah - I guess it's a lot to sort. Personally, your method makes sense to me - just set up folders in the C drive for the categories I'm interested in.

I'm now the only one on my computer - so I don't think I need a "my documents" folder (and certainly not a separate "Lynn's documents" folder). I am so glad to have found this forum and decided to get mastery and comprehension of my computer. Having professionals set things up - but not bother telling you what and why they did things - just complicates everything. And the pictures are also a mess bc. this helpful computer guy put picasa on my pc - which grabbed every picture - so that many pictures appear in picasa and elsewhere. It's the picture finding and organizing that seems the most daunting. Videos and music I've done myself in the past year - no one else has touched it but me. Word files are manageable too.

BP - my question about the Tivo files is that I want to sit in my living room, have Tivo search my computer to see what's on it. That's what I'm thinking has to be in the Tivo desktop program. When I'm at my computer, I think I can find the videos anywhere - I'm just thinking that no matter where they came from (Tivo desktop, hulu, my camcorder, edited in Videoredo), that I might somehow have to move them all to My Tivo Recordings folder in order to access it using the Tivo and watching tv. Do I have that right?

Jemdandy - that's one interesting way to approach the 2 drives - one for programs and one for data files. But then I'd be backing up data files to yet another place. I have a 500GB hard drive and am thinking of adding a second 1TB hard drive. So both drives have lots of room. Except for video files, I would think my c drive could easily handle my programs and data files (music, documents and pictures) - and the software and those files could be on the c drive and backed up to the second internal drive. Is there a reason - in terms of improved performance, etc - to use the c drive only for software? Does that add an extra step if I want to use one of my software programs (say photo editing) and have to go to the other drive to get the actual photos to work on? Or is it just as quick to run a program on one drive and get the data from the other? [Okay - good grief, it is].

Thanks everyone.
Lynn.

I don't remember for sure how Tivo finds the videos on the computer. I thought you could pick and choose what directories you make available to it, but I may be wrong on that. I enabled it out of curiosity, but never really used it that way. I only use it to transfer files to the PC, not the other way around.

I'll see if I can find some info on that.

I think they used to support that in the free Tivo desktop, but it's now available only with hte "plus" version. The plus version costs about $25 and may be worthwhile, because in addition to allowing you to publish videos, pictures and music from your PC to the Tivo, it also allows you to convert tivo files to the ipod.