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trailhiker Author

Level 1

5 points

Need simple instructions to help my full hard drive

I know this is a dumb question - but need help. My macbook pro is full (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) - 250GB - mostly of photos.

I want to move a bunch of my photos and movies off the mac and store them on external drive (or perhaps an offline option?). I have 150GB of photo/videos currently.

I DID use Time Machine previously to back up my machine, but that doesn't help my storage issue. Please confirm the difference between a Time Machine backup and an external drive - Does the time machine backup just make a copy of everything, and if so do I need another drive to store my photos?

I'm also reading I need some sort of clone of the machine to really have a backup?

Thanks!

Posted on Jan 30, 2020 3:57 PM

Top-ranking reply

John Galt

Level 10

146,210 points

Posted on Jan 30, 2020 6:40 PM

Does the time machine backup just make a copy of everything, and if so do I need another drive to store my photos?

Yes.

Time Machine cannot ameliorate a startup disk's limited capacity, and you should definitely not delete photos thinking Time Machine has safely archived them. TM is a backup system, not an archival system, meaning anything deleted from the source volume becomes a candidate for deletion when Time Machine requires the space, which it always will—eventually.

I want to move a bunch of my photos and movies off the mac and store them on external drive ...

Yes.

If you want to offload those images to an external storage device, you certainly can. Drag the entire Pictures folder to it, and then hold an Option key while launching the Photos app. It will ask you to identify the Photos Library you want to use.

Then, you can safely delete the redundant Photos Library.

By default, Time Machine will back up all mounted volumes, including the one where your photos reside.

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Need simple instructions to help my full hard drive

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