?: How do you move files to an external hard drive

Question

Hello everyone,
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro running Lion 10.7.5
I am starting to run out of internal HD space as my images in Photoshop are very large (over 1 GB ea.)
I currently use an external hard drive for Time Machine but would like to use a different external hard drive just to have my photo images on it.
Im assuming that i would purchase another external hard drive formatted for mac, plug it into my MBP and simply drag my image files from my MBP onto the external hard drive icon. After that just delete the images from my MBP HD. Is that all there is to it?
I wasnt sure if there was a step in there where you have to tell your MBP that the new external hard drive is NOT for Time Machine, but is simply to transfer image files onto (?)
Please let me know if this is how it works and how to do this.
best to you all and thanks so much for your help
take care,
rick

Answer 1

Rick,
the “EDIT” note in my last response was an “oh yeah, I should mention this” moment that I’d had after initially responding with my single “yup” sentence. You had mentioned that you were already using Time Machine to back up your internal hard drive to an external hard drive. I’d wanted to clarify that your new external hard disk should not be simultaneously used as a Time Machine backup drive; it should be treated just like your internal hard disk, in that it gets backed up by Time Machine (a “source” drive) rather than receives Time Machine backups (a “destination” drive), which your current external hard drive already does.
As far as my recommendations, I’ve had good results with the Hitachi hard drive series with five-year warranties. I’m currently using a Samsung 840 PRO SSD as my internal disk; so far, so good, but I don’t have long-term experience with it yet. (The 840 PRO has a five-year warranty also. As you can tell, I prefer drives with long warranties.) Since you have a 2009 MacBook Pro, getting your new drive in an external enclosure with a FireWire 800 port (and getting a FireWire 800 cable for it, of course) will allow the best performance when reading from or writing to it. Since it will be holding large images, performance will probably be an important criterion for you.
To set up your new external drive to be backed up by Time Machine, plug it in to your MacBook Pro, open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences, unlock the lock in the lower left corner if it shows a locked padlock,  press the “Options…” button in the lower right corner, and make sure that your new external drive is not in the list of drives excluded from being backed up. If it’s not there, then you should be good. If it is there, then you’ll need to select it and press the “-” button to “subtract” it from the list of excluded drives.