Hello, since there are so many file system of external hard drives, make sure where you want to use the drive to. You can check it in the Disk Utility.
( 1 )If the drive is exFAT/FAT32, please follow:
- Connect the external drive to Mac.
- Wait for the Mac to detect the drive and show it in Finder.
- Open the backup drive and create a folder to store backup files.
- Find and drag the important files to the folder.
( 2 )If the drive is NTFS, and you will use the drive in another Mac.
It's sad that Mac can't write the NTFS drive directly, which means you can copy files from your Mac to an NTFS drive, but you won't be able to modify or create new files on that drive directly from your Mac.
To enable full read and write access to an NTFS drive on a Mac, you would need to use third-party software such as iBoysoft NTFS for Mac.
( 3 )If the WD Easystore drive is new or if it's not formatted for macOS, you may need to format it.
Open Disk Utility on your MacBook Air, select the WD Easystore drive from the list of available drives, and choose the appropriate format (typically APFS). Be aware that formatting the drive will erase all existing data on it, so make sure to back up any important data before proceeding.
( 4 )If the drive is APFS and you want to use it on Windows, you need to format it to exFAT or FAT32.
Hope you can succeed backuping.
Also read: How to Backup Mac to Keep Your Files Safe
