The filing system of your computer determines the logical way and the physical way that files are stored on your system. The logical filing system is how your computer organises and displays your files on screen. The physical filing system is how the files are actually stored on a backing storage device. Consider the HTML files in the Clavius site. There are several hundred pages for all the various year groups, modules and tasks. If all of these files, along with the many hundreds of thousands of other files on a computer were stored on the hard disk in no particular order then it would be very difficult to find a particular file. A flat filing system does just this. It has all the files on a computer system stored on the root directory. This makes finding a particular file difficult to find. Modern computing systems use a hierarchical filing system. In a hierarchical filing system files are arranged in folders, also known as directories. In this way you can group files according to their type. For example you can save all English essays in one folder, all mp3 songs in a folder and all your digital camera pictures in another folder. This makes finding a file much easier. The physical way of saving files is the way in which the computer actually encodes the information on any form of backing storage device. Computers must record where on a disk information is stored. The operating system must record which files are stored where and which areas of the disk are free. This information is stored on a file allocation table. Answer the following questions in your jotter.
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