files moved to external hard drive still showing in finder - MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1 (23G93)

Hi, I've moved files (by dragging) over to my external hard drive on my MacBook Pro, Nov 23, Apple M3, but they are still showing in Finder. I don't need them on my Mac anymore, but definitely want them on the hard drive. Any suggestions? Thank you

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 14.5

Posted on Aug 25, 2024 2:34 PM

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Posted on Aug 25, 2024 5:35 PM

If you drag a file from your internal drive to an external drive, it is only copied, not moved. You can actually see this by the "+" icon that is displayed on top of the cursor as you are dragging the file.


So now, you have 2 copies of the files. You'd need to delete those from your internal drive (and empty the Trash to eventually recover the storage.) I would suggest to test the deletion with deleting only one file. I recently saw a discussion where the copy on the external drive was also deleted when the one on the internal drive was deleted. That seemed odd but you don't want to take a risk.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 25, 2024 5:35 PM in response to vcalhoun178

If you drag a file from your internal drive to an external drive, it is only copied, not moved. You can actually see this by the "+" icon that is displayed on top of the cursor as you are dragging the file.


So now, you have 2 copies of the files. You'd need to delete those from your internal drive (and empty the Trash to eventually recover the storage.) I would suggest to test the deletion with deleting only one file. I recently saw a discussion where the copy on the external drive was also deleted when the one on the internal drive was deleted. That seemed odd but you don't want to take a risk.

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files moved to external hard drive still showing in finder - MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1 (23G93)

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