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Transfer or back up your drive

Once your drive is set up, the menu-bar popover's More → Drive section gives you two safe ways to copy everything onto another external drive.

Where did "Choose Drive" go? It only appears during first-time setup. Switching an active drive that way would leave every relocated app and folder pointing at a drive that's no longer there, so once you have a working drive it's replaced by Transfer Drive and Backup Drive.

Transfer Drive vs Backup Drive

  • Transfer Drive copies your whole working folder to a new external

drive, verifies it, then switches over — re-pointing every relocated app and folder to the new drive and making it the active one.

  • Backup Drive makes the same verified copy but **leaves your current

drive active**. It's a point-in-time clone you can keep as a safety copy.

In both cases your old drive is never modified or deleted. After a transfer it stays behind as a complete fallback until you decide to erase or repurpose it.

Picking a drive

Only external drives are listed — your internal disk is never an option. If nothing suitable is connected you'll see a large No Drive Available message; plug a drive in and press Refresh.

Before anything copies, Storage Studio checks the destination:

  • It's an external drive (not your internal disk or a network share).
  • It's formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (HFS+).
  • It has enough free space for everything on your current drive.
  • It isn't already a Storage Studio drive for this Mac.

A quick read/write speed test also runs. If the drive is slow, or only usable with cautions, you're shown exactly why and asked to confirm before continuing. A drive that can't be used (internal, network, too small) can't be started at all.

While it runs

A live sheet shows the percentage, transfer speed, time remaining, and the file currently being copied. You can Pause and resume, or Cancel (which removes the half-finished copy on the new drive — never anything on your current drive).

The copy is handled by the background service, so:

  • You can close the window or quit Storage Studio and it keeps going.
  • It resumes automatically if a drive is briefly unplugged or your Mac

sleeps. Reopen the window to watch progress again.

Finishing a transfer

When the copy is verified, Storage Studio inspects it for completeness before changing anything. If everything checks out, it re-points your links to the new drive — asking once for your administrator password only if some of those links live in a protected place (for example, relocated apps in /Applications). If you decline, or the inspection finds a problem, nothing is switched and your current drive stays active.

A backup simply finishes with a Reveal Backup in Finder button pointing at the copy on the other drive.

If anything goes wrong at any stage, your current drive is left exactly as it was — Transfer and Backup only ever add data to the new drive.