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Edward House Author

Level 1

84 points

Merging (files & folders) Multiple old Ext. HD's onto new large Ext. HD?

How do I merge the files and folders from multiple External ( and main internal) HD to a NEW large External HD?

I have an old Macbook Pro, 2007 with Mavericks 10.9.5

After so many years I have accumulated 6 External HD's. Some are time machine backups and some are bootable copies.

Rather than set up RAID I would like to merge everything onto a bootable external hard drive; but I cannot find any info on how to merge all the folders.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jul 10, 2021 1:44 PM

Top-ranking reply

a brody

Level 10

84,049 points

Posted on Jul 12, 2021 9:43 AM

The best way is to make sure the large hard drive is partitioned as a single HFS Extended or APFS drive (if running 10.13 or later).

Then copy the files from each drive to their own folder on the large drive.

Symbolic links can be used to manage folders that ought to be on the internal drive but you lack space to do so.

Keep in mind, it is better to to make the symbolic link to an empty folder, and then copy the information there.

http://www.bombich.com/ Carbon Copy Cloner is really good at wholesale copying of folders from drive to drive on a Mac.

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Merging (files & folders) Multiple old Ext. HD's onto new large Ext. HD?

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