Mac running a little slower than usual. I took files from finder and place them on an external hard drive. Can I do a complete reboot of the Mac. Like a complete erase and restart with no files on it after I moved my files from finder to the hard drive?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 14.4
I'm assuming the files you transferred to your external drive were documents, photos, etc. and not applications and/or system files?
If that's the case, then you'd want to follow the steps to erase your Mac and reinstall your Mac's operating system: Erase and reinstall macOS - Apple Support.
Afterwards, simply drag the documents you moved to the external drive back over to your Mac.
Hope this helps.
The best means of ensuring you have a backup of everything on your Mac is to use a different external hard drive configured as a Time Machine backup drive. This will make a backup of everything on your Mac.
Here are some links to help you with this:
After getting the external drive, you'll want to format it to get rid of the stuff drive manufacturers like to preload: Initialize an external storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support. You'll want to format it as APFS (Step 5 in the procedure).
Next, you'll configure it as a Time Machine backup disk: Choose a backup disk and set encryption options on Mac - Apple Support. (Just a note here...this drive can only be used for Time Machine backups...it can't be used for any other purpose).
I recommend getting an external drive that's twice the size of your Mac's internal storage. So if you have a Mac with 1TB of internal storage, you'll want an external drive that's at least 2TB.
Hope this helps.
It did now I’m afraid to wipe it completely feeling like I missed some files. So is all files that I can and should move located in the finder or is there other areas I need to look and move as well?
if I place all files from finder can I do a reboot of my mac
