This is the proper way to store personal templates, reports and dashboards:
Save them into your personal folders so no one but you will be able to view them, including system administrators.
If you save them into a public folders you’ll be sharing your information with everyone else in the company.
This will create a couple of issues:
1) You’ll be showing everyone in your organization information they don’t need to see
2) You’ll be adding to the list of public reports, dashboards and templates, making it harder for people to find the report, dashboards and templates they need.
For example:
If a company has 50 Salesforce users and each user stores 3 personal reports in a public report folder, before you know it, you’ll have more than 150 reports to scroll thru to find the public report that you need. This wastes time and will result in users getting frustrated with Salesforce and not using it.
If you’re able to save your personal reports, dashboards or templates into a public folder, this brings up the issue of why Salesforce is setup so that anyone can save to a public folder? User permissions should be locked down so that this can not be accidentally done.
A best practice is to only allow Salesforce Administrators to save to public folders so that their contents can be carefully controlled.
Not sure which folders are your personal folders and which are public folders? Ask your Salesforce Administrator. They should be able to tell you.