It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search.
How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
>How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to?
All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day.
And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state.
These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago.
They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter".
They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers.
So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
You can build abstractions on top of the files and folders (and almost everyone does), but still provide access to regular files.
The entire point about files and folder abstractions is that they are portable across platforms and they are technically sound.
They want a moat, so they built one.
Who is disrespecting the users now?
Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access!
And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often.
For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures.
IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc.
But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files.
I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
Fully agreed there. It would be nice to have some real widely used standards in this space. I'd love to just have a single API available to query any of my datasets wherever they may be. When I open a picture picker I should see files from my NAS, from Google Photos, from my local device, from any remote device I can access at the moment, from a NextCloud instance, etc.
Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun?
Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it.
If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad.
Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now.
Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.