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Older hard drive will not allow me to put things from my new MacBook Pro on it. Why?


I have an old hard drive with pictures and documents from years ago. Why will my new MacBook Pro refuse to let me drag and drop new pictures to it.

MacBook Pro (2020 and later)

Posted on Jun 4, 2022 10:05 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 4, 2022 10:40 AM

Hi,


Check the format (Get Info: click on the drive to select it, hold down the Command key and press the i key). If it's NTFS that's the reason. macOS cannot natively write to NTFS. To be able to write to it, one option is to use a third party app such as Paragon.

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2 replies

Jun 4, 2022 6:03 PM in response to Retiredmusiclady

I hope you have a backup of that old drive so you have more than one copy of your important files stored on different external media. Drives fail. Old drives if they are not used regularly may not spin up at all after sitting too long. Or something else may happen to cause you to permanently lose access to the data on the drive.


You should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.


Older hard drive will not allow me to put things from my new MacBook Pro on it. Why?

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