MacMost Now 814: Viewing Volumes

Volumes are drives and other media connected to your Mac. You can view volumes in the Finder using the left sidebar, the Desktop, or in a Finder window. You can access them in several ways. You can also create a Dock Stack that gives you quick access to your Volumes.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's talk about the different ways you can see the volumes connected to your Mac.
Now Volume is basically a disk that is connected to your Mac. It can be your internal drive; it can be an external drive; it can be a thumb drive; it could be a camera hooked up to your Mac or an SD card from your camera that is put into the slot on the side of your MacBook. It can be a shared drive and it can even be a disk like a DVD inserted into your Mac.
There are many ways to view the Volume that is hooked up to your Mac. One is in the Finder window you will see under Devices a list of the different volumes. You can see I can easily hide that and show that so you might not see it there. Also, if you are in Finder under Finder Preferences you can decide what to show on the Desktop. There is different types of volumes. So for instance here I can select to have all the Hard disks shown and you can see them all appearing here. I can also say not have all the hard disks but only External disks or only CDs and DVDs. There is all sorts of different things that I can select to customize which shows up here on my Desktop.
Another way to view all the volumes is in a Finder window like this. If I Command click on the title here you can see I can move up the hierarchy and go from Documents to my User folder to the General Users folder to the Macintosh hard drive which is my internal drive or the level about that which is the name of my computer. When I do that I can see a list of the all the different volumes. I've got the CD here, I've got a bunch of internal drives, I've got a thumb drive, I've got even my network here which I can click on and then see all the shared network drives.
Another way to get there would be to use the Go menu and Go/Computer and it takes you to the same spot. You can also do Command/Shift/G or just go to Folder here and you can go /Volumes and this will take you to your list of volumes here. What you can do with this here is that you can actually drag this Volumes here to the Dock. This is handy, a lot of people do this. Drag it to the right side of the Dock here and then you get a stack that is all your Volumes. You can of course customize this stack to open in a different way; say you want to open it as a list instead and you can easily get to all the different Volumes that you have connected at any time.
Now let's say you are editing a document like here I am in TextEdit and I want to save something to one of these Volumes. I can do that in many ways. In this case instead of a document that already exists I'm going to Move To function which is equivalent kind of to Save As and I'm going to in Where choose and I can go to Devices here and choose one of these devices to save it to. Obviously I can't save it to the optional drive here but I can save it to say the Thumb drive or some other drive here and move it there. 
So you can find that in all sorts of different things. Like here I'm going to create a new TextEdit document. I'm going to save it and I'm going to select one of these devices here. I can expand that and then go deeper down into, you can see I am on my computer there, so I get that same list of volumes and now I can go into this and view it just like I can in the Finder using different ways of viewing lists.
So I hope you found this tip useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 814: Viewing Volumes”

RAY WHITEHEAD

11 years ago

Great Site. I am really enjoying(learning) from the Video Guide to Mountain Lion.

Nilesh Parmar

Im having a problem when i upgraded to Mountain Lion with server drive volumes, every time my computer goers to sleep our network server drive disappears. its definitely a bug as when i googled it, others have the same problem too. Have you heard of this issue?

Gary Rosenzweig

No, sorry, I haven't experienced it. Is maybe the network drive going into power-saving mode? Or, maybe it just takes your wireless network a minute to re-establish a connection with either your Mac or the drive. If you set up an alias to that drive, do it help ease the reconnection?

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MacMost Now 814: Viewing Volumes

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 814: Viewing Volumes”

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