How do you transfer all your files to an external hard drive?

Question

Level 1

0 points

How do you transfer all your files to an external hard drive?

I have an external hard drive and tried to move all my files and documents onto it. The guy at the apple store told me to just drag my user into the hard drive (the icon with the house next to it when you go into Macintosh HD) but it said it could not do that. So i tried to drag just one word document into it and it still had the error. I tried from a PC and it worked fine. Could it be that this external hard drive only works with a PC and Microsoft Operating Systems? Do I need to buy an external hard drive that is only for a Mac??

Please help!!!!

MacBook

Posted on Oct 19, 2012 5:30 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 20, 2012 8:42 AM in response to nikkii426

This is not unusual

Quick question, have you formatted the drive using the mac disk utilities?

If you need it to be accessed from both windows and mac, then make sure it's formatted as FAT32 or FAT Extended.

If you uses osx journaled, then the windows computer cannot read it.

When you've done this, then try and drag your files across.

Two words of warning though.

1 when you format a drive, you erase all data on it, so make sure you have copies.

2 FAT32 has a max file size of 4GB, so if you have files larger than that, format as FAT Extended.

Reply