Types of Electronic Filing Systems

The computer term "electronic filing system" can refer to several different things in regards to hard drives and file storage methods. Here are the various usages of the term, and examples of each which you may come across in everyday implementation.

The Facts

The most common use of the term "file system," sometimes written as one word, is in regards to the formatting method used to initialize a hard drive. On Windows computers, file systems are usually FAT (File Access Table) or FAT32, or NTFS (New Technology File System); on Macintosh computers, file systems are nearly always HFS+ (Hierarchical File System Plus). There are many other kinds of file systems, such as ZFS (which is not a set of initials), which are not commonly used on home computers.

Significance

File systems provide both the technical method of reading from and writing to hard drives, as well as the metaphor used by programmers and users in conceptualizing their data. The standard metaphor, of computer files stored in hierarchical folders, is so common that most people forget it's a metaphor at all. But as all computer data is just a series of bits, there are alternative methods of conceptualizing this data. The discontinued Apple Newton, for example, stored information in a "data soup" format which bypassed files entirely.

Benefits

File systems each provide various low-level benefits, many of which are not visible to the end user, but which are designed to provided increased security and speed. For example, Apple switched from HFS to HFS+ in order to allow for a larger maximum hard drive size and to enable "journaling," which is a method of maintaining data integrity even when drive errors occur.

Filing Types

Electronic filing systems can also refer to the conceptual methods used to organize files and folders. The most common method is hierarchical; a writer might store her letters in a series of nested folders such as: Documents > Correspondence > Family > 2009 > February. Faster hard drive search mechanisms makes hierarchical filing unnecessary in many cases, so many people have switched to alphabetical filing, in which everything is simply stored in a Correspondence folder, which would appear after "Archive" and before "Education." An alternative is the Noguchi filing system, where everything is stored by the date it was written, or last referred to.

Considerations

In most cases, you won't need to decide on which hard drive file system to use; there will be a default based on your operating system, which you only need to change if you expect the hard drive to be used on multiple operating systems. However, you may want to consider using different conceptual filing systems, as many people spend a lot of time working with hierarchical systems, which could be saved if they relied on their computers to search their files as needed.