Moving old data from hard drives to external SSD

I have several TB of data (photos, documents etc) on external hard drives from several earlier Macs. I now have an M4 mini and want to access these and transfer to an external SSD. How do I best go about this please?

Apple TV 4K, tvOS 18

Posted on Aug 17, 2025 3:29 AM

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Posted on Aug 23, 2025 7:40 AM

I would suggest that if you have a lot of files to copy, that you do it using Carbon Copy Cloner (folder to folder “backup”). Superduper! could probably do this as well.


The issue with using Finder (at least in the past) is that sometimes, when told to copy many files in one batch, it chokes and throws up Error -36. (But if you use Finder and you don’t see Error -36, things should be OK.)

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Aug 23, 2025 7:40 AM in response to Pat Taylor

I would suggest that if you have a lot of files to copy, that you do it using Carbon Copy Cloner (folder to folder “backup”). Superduper! could probably do this as well.


The issue with using Finder (at least in the past) is that sometimes, when told to copy many files in one batch, it chokes and throws up Error -36. (But if you use Finder and you don’t see Error -36, things should be OK.)

Aug 23, 2025 7:44 AM in response to Pat Taylor

There may be changes in the structure of libraries like iPhoto / Aperture / Photos libraries, or iTunes / Music libraries, but you can deal with that after you get the files consolidated onto a new SSD.


With libraries, you would definitely want to hang onto copies of the originals until you were sure that any conversion to a newer library format had gone well.

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Moving old data from hard drives to external SSD

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