Using external drive to store movies

Hi, HFB,

Yes, you can store your movies on an external drive.

If the movies have been shared out to the Finder as standalone movies they can be copied or moved to an external drive. The drive can be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) to play on Apple devices, or ExFat to play on both Apple and Windows devices.

If when you say "store movies" you mean storing the iMovie still-editable projects themselves on an external drive, you would need to transfer the iMovie Library that contains the projects to the external drive. In that case, the drive would need to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), not ExFat or FAT 32.

In the event that you need to reformat your external drive be aware that reformatting erases all data on the drive, so first back up any data that you want to keep.

As a safety tip, it is always best first to copy, rather than move, your data to the external drive, Then you can go back and delete the originals from your internal drive when you are satisfied that the copy-over was successfully completed.

-- Rich

Great! You are good to go. Since you ordered the drive from Apple it probably is already formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You probably already know this, but to check the drive's format you can control-click on the drive's icon on your desktop and do a Get Info from the drop down menu.

-- Rich

Another thing. All external drives eventually fail. They have 3-5 year lives, sometimes less. So good idea to purchase a second external drive so that you can back up the first external drive. I keep double or triple backups of all my movies and iMovie libraries, in addition to all my other data. I've had a couple of external drives go south on me and was darned glad that I had backups.

-- Rich

I have no specific tech info on the longevity of SSD drives, but I would assume that they would have good longevity. I think it was the electronics that failed in my drives, because even though I couldn't read the data I could hear the drive spinning.

To be really safe one should store a separate backup off premises in case of fire or other calamity that might damage or destroy the drive at its home storage place.

Today a lot of folks purchase cloud based storage for their movies and other data. Apple doesn't sell pure cloud storage as I understand it. Apple's cloud storage is for syncing data between devices, so if you delete data from one device you delete it from all devices -- not a situation that bodes well for pure storage. Too easy to make a mistake. Personally, I don't use the cloud, preferring instead to keep personal possession of my data.

-- Rich