Back in the early Windows days, I was helping somebody on Windows get some data somewhere else where I needed it. I started by opening the file manager and find

Back in the early Windows days, I was helping somebody on Windows get some data somewhere else where I needed it. I started by opening the file manager and finding the data files. He was like "Whoa ... you are in no-mans-land" ... he just wasn't familiar with accessing files outside of an application. There are a couple of orthogonal concepts are work here a) how data is stored, in files with a well-known format, in files with a proprietary format, or perhaps in some kind of database b) who has control of the data, perhaps defined by who would be able to delete it, or whether the data would cease to be accessible if a particular organization ceased to exist.