How can I transfer files from Disk Utility to an external hard drive in Recovery Mode?

Question

How can I transfer files from Disk Utility to an external hard drive in Recovery Mode?

My MacBook won't boot and is stuck at a gray screen with Apple logo. Gunius Bar diagnosed it with an unfixable B-Tree error and suggested I boot into Recovery Mode to manually copy all my files to an external hard drive and then reinstall the OS. I want to do it at home because it would take hours to transfer my files. In Disk Utility, I'm able to browse File > Open Disk Image > Macintosh HD > Users to get to my personal folder. But how can I copy it to the external drive? Can you help? Much appreciated.

Best Answered by

Jenny Zeng

Answered on Tuesday, December 3, 2024

To copy your files from Disk Utility to an external drive in macOS Recovery Mode, you need to use Terminal. Follow the steps below:

Ensure the external hard drive is connected to your Mac.
In Disk Utility, check the internal volumes and make sure they are all mounted. (If FileVault is enabled, the data volume will be grayed out and you need to unlock it by selecting it and entering the login password.)
Close Disk Utility and choose Utilities > Terminal from the menu bar.
To copy your user folder to the external drive, run:cp -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/user_name/ /Volumes/volume_name

Replace user_name with your user folder's name and volume_name with the external drive or partition's name.

For example, to move from a user folder called My Drive to an external drive named Data, the command should be: cp -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/My\ Drive/ /Volumes/Data

Note: If Terminal doesn't work, you can run data recovery software in macOS Recovery Mode to get all files out of the unbootable Mac.

If you want to learn more details about copying files in Terminal, take a look at: How to Copy a File/Directory in macOS Terminal with the cp command?