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Author Topic: Moving contents of hard drive to another - Mac  (Read 574 times)

NigelC

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Moving contents of hard drive to another - Mac
« on: May 16, 2019, 03:27:15 pm »

In the process of moving a number of hard drives from PC to Mac I want to do the following.

a) Previously, I have plugged a PC formatted HD with most of my photo folders into iMac and painfully imported folders one by one into the Lightroom Catalogue. Being NFTS this is read only whereas I need read/write use. I have a new SSD the same size formatted for Mac and want to know the best way to transfer to it all the contents of other hard drive. I assume Time Machine is essentially for creating back ups - that's not what I need as the new destination will be in regular read/write use. Also, if I do that at system level is there a way to change the drive in the LR catalogue without having to add every single folder again? (although there are also document folders on source hard drive not just photos.

b) Same situation with two external hard drives previously used with a Windows laptop. I want to swap data between these two so that I can sequentially format each for Mac. None of the folders has yet been added to LR catalogue.

Just to add these drives do not need to be dual PC/Mac read, just mac.
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Joe Towner

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Re: Moving contents of hard drive to another - Mac
« Reply #1 on: May 19, 2019, 01:10:26 am »

You'll be able to directly copy the folders from the PC formatted drive (NTFS) to a Mac formatted SSD - drag from the old drive to the new one - it'll have a green circle with a + to symbolize that it's a copy.  In Lightroom you can either right click a folder and say 'Find Missing Folder' and point it at the new root folder of your photos, or you can say 'Find missing photos' and point it at one, then tell it to find neighboring photos.

What's the size of the external hard drives?  Might be easier to start with a new external HD, copy everything to it, then wipe the now empty old one, and copy the second disk over.
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NigelC

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Re: Moving contents of hard drive to another - Mac
« Reply #2 on: May 19, 2019, 04:57:55 am »

You'll be able to directly copy the folders from the PC formatted drive (NTFS) to a Mac formatted SSD - drag from the old drive to the new one - it'll have a green circle with a + to symbolize that it's a copy.  In Lightroom you can either right click a folder and say 'Find Missing Folder' and point it at the new root folder of your photos, or you can say 'Find missing photos' and point it at one, then tell it to find neighboring photos.

What's the size of the external hard drives?  Might be easier to start with a new external HD, copy everything to it, then wipe the now empty old one, and copy the second disk over.
In both cases 1TB
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Joe Towner

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Re: Moving contents of hard drive to another - Mac
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2019, 08:49:22 pm »

Then yes, I'd recommend snagging a new 2tb drive, format it Mac (HFS+ or APFS), copy everything off one of the 1tb drives to the new 2tb disk. Format the now empty drive for Mac, copy everything from the 2nd 1tb disk to the now empty 1tb disk.
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