How To Archive Files On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about archiving files on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 900 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

I often talk about archiving files especially in situations where you are limited in disk space or your internal hard drive is full. But what exactly do I mean by archiving files? Well, an old definition of archiving would have to do with compression. Years ago if you said you wanted to archive a file what you actually did with it was compress the file to make it smaller but a little harder to access. So you may have a 100 MB document file, compress it, and you end up with say a 30 MB file and you don't have easy access to it anymore but it's still there on your hard drive taking up a lot less space. However, that's not what I mean today. Compressing really doesn't work as well anymore because most of the files we deal with are already compressed. Image files, video files, audio files, and other types of documents already use lots of compression. So if you take a 100 MB document today you may find that by compressing it you don't save any space at all. Even documents that have things inside it, like PDF's and word processing documents that have images in them, they use those images in compressed format. So compressing them can be frustrating because you don't seem to save much space. 

So what I really mean by archiving today is taking files off your Mac's internal drive where space is limited and moving them to a large external drive or other storage solution. So what should you archive? Well, the best example are projects. Older projects from work or personal use that you no longer need regular access to. So say you filled a folder with files for a project for work. It's taking up a lot of space but you are done with it. The project is finished and you probably won't need those files again. You could then take that folder full of files, move it to an external drive, and free up that space on your internal drive while still knowing that you've got a copy of all of those files around. Sometimes it may only be part of a project. For instance if you compile a report quarterly for work you may have a ton of data files that you want to archive, but the report itself you want to keep on your internal drive. Naturally this is really only for things that have large files. If you have a bunch of old reports but they are tiny files you could keep years or even decades of them around on your internal drive without using much space. But if you create video projects or audio projects it's easy for just a single project to take up a huge slice of your drive. When you're done with that project there's no reason to keep it around on your Mac. 

Another example may be videos. I often talk about not storing videos in your Mac's Photos Library. This really depends on how you use photos versus videos. I mostly take photos. If I take a few videos usually they are not that interesting and I'll archive them to an external drive instead of having them in my Photos Library. Another example may be iMovie Libraries. Instead of using just one iMovie Library for everything you may want to create a new iMovie Library every time you start a new project, have a single project and event in there, and then when you're done it's easy to take that one iMovie Library and archive that to an external drive freeing up all that space on your internal drive. You may keep the final video around on your internal drive but all those big original clips, photos, sound effects and everything now can be somewhere else, out of the way, but still there just in case years from now you want to go back and make a change. 

So when should you archive files? Well, you should do it when you're pretty sure you never are going to need those files again. A project that is completely done. A video that's been completely created and edited and completed. Only when you're sure that you're not going to need it any time soon and maybe even never, then you should archive it. The idea is that you do have this copy just in case you change your mind or just in case you need to go back to some file in there. It's still around. It's just not going to be something easily available to you but also not taking up space. So you really need to weigh the chance that you need files versus the size of files. If it's a small file there's really no harm keeping it around. But a large file you want to archive but you need to think about how likely is it I'm going to need this file sometime soon. 

Now where should you archive files?  Well, the simple solution is that you get an external drive. But there are many types of external drives. Here's a chart that shows some of the main options. You can get a regular Bare Drive, this is usually called an internal drive if you want to search for it on Amazon. You need to plug this into a Dock. But the Dock only costs about $30 and they connect to your Mac by USB. It's easy to buy a lot of these internal drives. You can even get little plastic cases for them for storage. Then you can move files to these and they could be really large, like typically now you could buy ones that are 14TB in size. But you can also get 4TB ones that are pretty cheap. You can get the same thing but already inside of a case with a USB connection. Then it's kind of an all-in-one solution. You don't need anything additional. You plug it into your Mac by USB and you can store a lot of files onto it. Both of these are about the same size and about the same cost. 

Now you can also go for a much smaller portable drive. I like to use these. They are usually 4 or 5 TB now which is a little bit more per TB than the bigger drives but you don't need an external power source. They just plug into your Mac without any other cables. They are really compact and easy to store. Now you can go with even more compact solutions. For instance you can get the little typical flash drives. You can get these with both the older USB and the new USBC connections and you can get them up to one TB. They're tiny, easy to carry around and store. They are slower though. They are not slower when you want to put a single file on them. But if you're transferring say a 200GB to them you'll definitely see a much slower transfer rate. But that's usually not too much of a problem for archiving files. Then you can go really tiny and get SD cards or micro SD cards, the kinds that you use in cameras. These, of course, typically don't store as much data on each one but they are really small. They are going to cost the most but it is kind of neat to have years of archived data stored in a tiny little space in a desk drawer. There are other solutions but they are not ones most people typically go for. For instance you can get a Blue ray disk drive and sort things on blue ray disks but they only store about 25 GB on a disk. So it's not really a good solution anymore. You can also get things called LCO tapes which you'd use magnetic tapes to store things. Big corporations use these because they are really cheap to store a ton of data. Again, not something for the typical home user. Online storage is another option. But online storage usually runs in the 1, 2, 3 TB range. It's so much easier to get a 14TB drive and use that instead. You don't have the problem of large data transfer times and using up lots of internet band width to upload the files. 

Now people sometimes ask me about iCloud.  Hey, can I store my files on iCloud. iCloud is not a storage solution. iCloud mirrors what's on your hard drive. It's basically the same thing as your internal hard drive. It's the main place where you want to have your current files, the ones you're currently using, accessing, and working on. You archive things off of your internal hard drive or off of iCloud. You don't use iCloud for archiving. 

Now when you're using an external drive to archive something here's a tip. A lot of people will copy a file from their internal drive to the external drive and then delete the original file. You can certainly do that. But you could also move something to an external drive. Watch as I drag this file onto my archive drive and notice it puts a little green plus symbol there saying that it's going to make a copy of this file. But if I hold the Command key down you could see the plus symbol goes away. Now it's going to Move that file. The file won't get removed from your internal hard drive until the copy is complete. So it's still pretty safe to use. If you have a lot of files to move it's typical to maybe move many gigs of files over at the end of the day and let it kind of complete while you go and do something else. This way you don't have to remember to go back and delete the files that you copied. It all takes place with one action. Even though it might take a long time.

So what about compression? A lot of people think, well if I'm going to archive these files maybe I should compress them and take up less space. Like I mentioned before compressing files today really doesn't get you much typically. I mean if you're using an uncompressed file format, and you know it, well then yes. But the typical document today would actually already have compressed images in it. A typical video that you make would already be in a compressed format. So compressing something is just going to take awhile and may not get you that much space. So it's not something I typically worry about when archiving files. 

So some other things to consider. A home user may just have one large archive drive and may be able to use that forever. But if you use your Mac for business or you do lots of video work and things like that you may find that you have a new archive drive every year or two. In that case you want to make sure you label each one so you know what's on it. If you're really organized you may want to keep a record of what's on each archive drive. So you can create archive A, B, C, etc., and then have, maybe, a text file or spreadsheet that says on archive A I've got these projects. On archive B I've got these projects. This makes it a little bit easier to find things. 

Now you may also want to think of Backups. If you are archiving something to an external drive then typically those files only exist in one place, that external drive. So for some people that may be fine. You probably won't need these files again anyway. But other people may want to have a second copy, a second archive. So you may want to get two drives instead of one. Every time you archive a file put it in both places. Then maybe store that second drive at another location for safety. You may also want to think of future maintenance for this archive. It's wrong to think that your archive drive now is going to last fifty years. Think about what you would have used for an archive twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I was archiving things to DVD's. Eventually I transferred all the DVD data to external hard drives. Several times after that I've upgraded to larger and larger archive drives. The same thing is going to happen in the future. If you buy a 14TB archive drive now it may last for awhile but you may end up putting it on a 100TB drive in ten years or moving it to some new storage medium that hasn't even been invented yet. The great thing about digital data is you can make exact copies of it so you can change archives without loosing anything. I have files on my archive today that were originally on floppies from my first Mac. Then went to CD's, then went to DVD's, then went to larger and larger drives until they exist now on my current archive drive exactly as they were when I first created them. 

So if you don't have an archive solution now but your internal drive is getting pretty full, you may want to consider grabbing a good external drive, archiving some files to it, and maintaining this archive, keeping it organized, and that will prevent your internal drive from filling up and also get a lot of the old clutter out of the way.