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How to Transfer All Data of a Mac to an External Hard Drive?

I must say goodbye to my 2010 iMac. How can I remove my documents and preserve them? Some are very old but precious. I want to banish and destroy any personal/financial information, and photos in iCloud. What's the process for saving? What is important and making sure the rest is gone for good?

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Sherry Song

Sherry Song

Answered on Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Hello, there are many solutions you can try:

(1) The Fastest way to transfer files to an external hard drive to a Mac is with iBoysoft MagicMenu. It's a Finder context menu tool that can enable you to copy or move files to any place on your Mac.

 Download

iBoysoft MagicMenu

Rating:4.8

     

(2) Drag and drop holding the Command Key.

(3) Use keyboard shortcuts Command+C and Command+V keys.

(4) Use Terminal to run the mv command.

(5) Use Finder to drag and drop directly. 

(6) Use Time Machine backup.

If you can't move the files to the external drive, maybe the file system is NTFS, which can't be written on Mac. So you can choose to utilize iBoysoft NTFS for Mac. It allows you to move the files easily on Mac.

 Download

iBoysoft NTFS for Mac

Rating:4.8

     

Also read: How to Move/Transfer Files from Mac to External Hard Drive?

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