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External Hard Drives Keep Disconnecting after Upgrading to Big Sur, What to Do?

I recently upgraded my installation of High Sierra to Big Sur 11.5.1. Now I'm constantly having problems with my external hard drives. My time machine hard drive formatted in APFS routinely stops working and oh, I've had to wipe it three times and start the backup process so far. My other external backup hard drive for data keeps disconnecting itself. It is a 10GB Seagate Backup Plus formatted in NTFS, and I'm also using the NTFS for Mac software to use it. Nothing is more frustrating than a stupid error message that says I shouldn't unplug my drive when I haven't. The proof is in the pudding that Apple rushed Big Sur to the market without proper testing. Are there any solutions to this horrible data ruining problem?

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Ciki Liu

Ciki Liu

Answered on Thursday, March 9, 2023

Since the external hard drive keeps disconnecting issue occurs only after upgrading to macOS Big Sur, it's highly likely there are some system bugs that prevent your drives from functioning normally. Another possibility is your drive doesn't support the upgraded OS. To fix the disconnecting issue, you can choose to upgrade or downgrade the macOS. However, before that, it's necessary to recover data from disconnecting external hard drives.

If your Seagate external hard drive keeps disconnecting while backing up or transferring data, your data can easily get lost during the process. To avoid further data loss, you should use professional Mac data recovery software, iBoysoft Data Recovery, to recover data from external hard drives on Mac.

Due to its high recovery rate, various applicable scenarios, and a wide range of macOS support – from macOS 10.9 to macOS 13 Ventura, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is one of the best external hard drive and USB recovery software. Download it to experience excellent data recovery performance.

Now we can proceed with solutions to fix the external hard drive keeps disconnecting on Mac problem.

To start with, run a basic combability check of your external hard drive. Go to Seagate official website and see if your model works with the OS you install. If yes, as mentioned above, the biggest culprit so far is the macOS itself. Therefore, you can either wait for the next update and hope Mac engineers can fix this issue. Or, you can manually downgrade to the previous macOS. If not, the only option left is to downgrade macOS.

The process to downgrade macOS requires full preparations. You may refer to the link above for a detailed and comprehensive tutorial.

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