How to use external hard drive

I purchsed my mac mini four years ago. It came with an external hard drive. I have never used it and don't know how or what i am doing! But now that i have movies and pictures on my computer i want to make sure i have them backed up. How do i work this thing?

Hi, Alan.
The Ext drive should have either a firewire or usb cable,and a power supply.
The sockets on the mac mini for these 2 interfaces are different, so the cable will only fit into one.
Make sure the plug is right way round and don't try and force it into a socket.
Do this before you turn on the mac mini and power up the ext drive.
Boot your mac, open applications, select utilities and then Disk Utility.
If everything's working and connected you should see the ext drive listed on the left as the second entry.
Click on it and DU will give you size, file system type, etc. If it came with your mac I suspect it will already be formatted.
It should also appear on your desktop as the next icon under th Mac HD one.
You can either use time machine to backup everything on the Mac Hd drive automatically, or simply drag and drop the folders you want to keep onto the new drive. It's easier if you open the drive's folder to do this.
Hope this helps,
regards,
Scorpii

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FireWire
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Huh? I'll have to read and reread this until it sinks in. I learn alot from this site.
So, here is what I would suggest doing first time
around (assuming a fast Firewire connection and that
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Use CCC to clone your internal to the external. As I
said, if you set it so it does NOT remove things from
the external not on the internal, you will be safe
with the stuff you have already removed from the
internal to the external not being removed.
Now that you have a clone, you can feel a little
safer deleting stuff out of the internal. If you get
to a point where you wish you hadn't deleted
something or actually mess something in the system
up, you can always get it back off the enternal drive
or even clone the external back to the internal tgo
get back to square one. If it is a Firewire drive,
and you told CCC to make the clone bootable, you can
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interal up that badly.
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your internal so you can have more freedome to clear
up your internal without too much fear of losing
something or messing up your system.
Patrick
Well, I'll study what you say, but here's what I have done. One-by-one I transferred files from my internal hard drive to my external drive. "Transfered" is not the correct word, because the process merely plants a duplicate of the file in the external drive. Anyway, then I one-by-one trashed the original copies that had been left in the internal drive. The result? no backup but more space in my internal hard drive.
If I had it to do over, I would have just cloned (your word) ALL the files and later decided which ones I wanted to keep on my internal drive. However, I forgive myself. After all, I've never done it before, and it's all new to me.

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