Working folders

Yet another page about project management for projects that need to append to, create, or otherwise manipulate multiple digital files. Software like the R statistical programming language or UGENE bioinformatics workbench work best if attention to how related files are stored for retrieval.

For a project involving use of a laptop or other personal computer, each participant in the project should establish and maintain a working folder, also known as a working directory for the project. The working folder is the location on your computer where project-related files are retrieved, saved, and stored. Working folders may be located on your computer or in your cloud storage (e.g., DropBox, github, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive). Why a local folder, why not a cloud storage folder as working folder? Cloud storage folders located at github are particular easy to share with colleagues and to set rules and log access; Thus, the distinction can be laid at the extent that sharing needs to be achieved to complete a project.

Because you are likely to work on many projects for your company or college, the working folder should be named for the working group, with each project given its own subfolder name.

For example, the working folder may be called BI308L for the student’s course with a subfolder called HIF1A example for a comparative protein sequence project involving the HIF1A protein.

For example:

On my Win11 PC the path to my working and subfolders is

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\OneDrive\Desktop\BI308L\HIF1A

Win11 tip: create the folders in Explorer

On my macos laptop the path to my working and subfolder would be

/Users/[USERNAME]/Desktop/BI308L/HIF1A

macos tip: create the folders in Finder

Within the subfolder, it is advisable to setup folders to contain related files. For example, subfolders for coding work might be called Scripts, a subfolder for output from programs may be called Results, and so on. Like the working folder and project subfolder, it is best to standardize the names of these subfolders.