Recognising User and File Management Tasks

Two of the functions of an operating system are easy to mix up: user management and file management. When you meet a description of a task, ask yourself whether it is really about a person or about a file.

User management deals with people. Creating, changing or removing an account, checking someone's identity when they log in, deciding what a standard user or an administrator may do, keeping one person's work area private from everyone else's, and writing a record of who logged in and when — all of these are user management.

File management deals with files and folders. Naming a file and giving it an extension so the right application opens it, putting it into a folder in a hierarchy, moving, copying, renaming or deleting it, saving it and recording where it is stored, opening and searching for it, and setting what each user may do with that particular file are all file management.

Sorting the two apart

Described task	Function
A volunteer at a food bank has their account disabled when they leave	User management
A recording of a band rehearsal is deleted from the music department's shared drive	File management
The system records that a lifeguard logged in at 07:45 before opening the pool	User management
A backup copy of the club's membership list is made on a memory stick before the laptop is updated	File management

The quick test is this: if the task is about somebody's account, or about what they are allowed to do on the machine, it is user management. If the task is about organising, storing or finding files, it is file management. File permissions sit on the border, because they are tied to the user who is logged in, but they are rules about one named file, so they belong with file management. Notice too that none of this is about memory or the storage hardware — file management is about keeping files organised so you can find them again, and the correct name for it is file management, never folder management.

Sorting the two apart

Practise this