Transfering Photos to external HDD

[Joe San]

This should be really simple, but I don't understand why it is not possible to copy files from my Mac to my external HDD? I can click and copy the files on my Mac, but when I hit Paste in the file system of my external HDD that is connected, the Paste is always disabled. Why is this? Any suggestions?

[Bear Bibeault]

I do it all the time -- although I usually just use drag-and-drop. If you prefer paste, have you just tried ⌘-V?

[Joe San]

Nothing works! I'm starting to believe that the different file system format of my external HDD is actually causing this issue. I don't know how to solve this. It is about 100 GB of data that I want to move to my external HDD so that my SSD drive is freed up for something else.

[Bear Bibeault]

So what is happening? You've been around these forums long enough to know that "it's not working" isn't helpful.

100G is a lot of data to move at once. I'd do it in smaller chunks.

What are the "differing formats"? It shouldn't make any difference.

Have you tried moving a single file? A single folder? Have you tried it from the command line?