Is there a way to ‘move’ a file from my iMac to my external hard drive without it just ‘copying’ the file over?
Sometimes I forget if I already copied the file to the external hard drive, so I end up with more duplicated files than necessary.
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K.R. Knight
Hold the Command key down while dragging. When you drag a file or folder to another drive, it will copy by default. But holding Command down while dragging changes that to a copy-and-delete, AKA "move."
The Option key will do the same thing for dragging on the same drive. Drag and drop between folders on the same drive will move the file. But hold down Option and drag and drop and it copies the file and leave the original in place.
I have same problem. Using Mojave want to upgrade to Monterey. But have thousands of important doc, docx & xls files which I want to keep on external hard drive. Office 2008 is not compatible with Monterey. Can Monterey open those files. I just want to use Pages & Numbers & take Microsoft programs off my iMac 2017. Thanks so much Gary for all your wonderful work.
Lorraine: Pages can open Word files and Numbers can open Excel files. But the apps aren't the same, so not all features are supported. You can try it right now and see what you get. Or, just get newer versions of Microsoft apps. You said you have thousands of documents in those formats, so I would imagine it is worth it.
Many thanks Gary will give it a try.
How can I move files not in the iCloud Drive but in iCloud to an external drive to free up space?
Gladys: I don't know what you mean. iCloud Drive is the part of iCloud that stores files. So if you have files in iCloud, then they are in iCloud Drive. If you move them to an external drive that removes then from iCloud Drive.