Quick Time movie recording to an external hard disk

you can use the keyboard shortcut "shift-command-5" to bring up the recording controls. then choose "options".

and then, in those controls, look at your "save to" location and choose where you want it to be saved.

in my above options, "External Video" is one of my external drives.

but I also need to mention to you that with my longer videos, I have had issues with recordings stopping unexpectedly and / or not saving when attempting to save them directly to my external drive. now, when I do a screen recording, I always use "desktop" as my save to location. once they are successfully saved, I then move them manually to the external drive I want to put them on.

kingfisher500 wrote:

Thank you for your response.

you're welcome.

Concerning your caution about problems with saving directly to an external drive, I am trying to avoid having the movie temporarily stored on my MacBook's internal SSD as I am concerned that this may shorten the life of that drive.

well that's your choice. but please don't say I didn't warn you. I sincerely hope you don't lose an important recording.

but as far as shortening the life of the drive, your Mac will likely be obsolete long before you could "wear out" the SSD.

the numbers I have see where usage is concerned, it's a rough average that you would have to write 100 GB every day for 10 years before you would wear out a 1 TB drive.