A tour of the Data Parking window

The Data Parking window is two file browsers side by side with a control column between them. The left pane starts in your home folder; the right pane starts in Storage Studio's folder on your external drive. Nothing moves until you tick items and press an action.

Open it from the More menu → Data Parking….

The two panes

Each pane has a small toolbar along the top:

• Go up one level (up arrow) and the house button, which takes the left pane to your home folder and the right pane to Storage Studio's folder on your drive.
• Choose folder (folder icon) to jump anywhere with a standard Open panel.
• On the right pane only, a destination button lists your drive, your connected cloud accounts and cloud folders on this Mac, plus Choose any folder…, Manage cloud accounts… and Refresh destinations. See Parking a folder in a cloud account.
• Sort order — sort by Name, Size, Date modified or Date created. Picking the same choice again flips the direction. Size and dates start with the largest or newest first.
• The eye button shows or hides hidden items, such as folders whose names start with a dot. Hidden items inside a folder you move always go with it, whether or not they're shown.
• Refresh this pane re-reads the folder and clears that pane's ticks.

At the bottom of each pane, All ticks everything, and a line shows how many items are ticked and how much they hold.

Real folder sizes

Folder sizes are the space each folder really takes on disk, measured in the background. Storage Studio measures slowly on purpose so it never gets in the way of your own work. Until a folder has been measured, the total says how many are still being measured rather than guessing.

Apps are listed but can't be ticked — move apps from the Apps window, which has its own safety checks.

Pairing

Move, Merge and Relocate only work once the two panes are paired. Pairing means "these two folders are the same place on two disks".

1. Open folders with the same name on both sides — for example, Projects on your Mac and Projects on your drive. The middle column says Ready to pair.
2. Click Pair. It now says Paired and Hierarchy preserved.
3. Open a subfolder on one side and the other side follows. Anything you move lands at the same place inside the paired folder on the other side.

If the names differ, the column says Not pairable and Folder names differ. When the right pane is on your drive, a button offers to create the matching folder there (Create on NVMe), or to switch to one that already exists (Use existing). Unpair lets the panes move independently again.

%% caption: How pairing turns on the move buttons
flowchart TD
  A[Open a folder on each side] --> B{Same folder name?}
  B -->|No| C[Not pairable - create or open the matching folder]
  C --> A
  B -->|Yes| D[Ready to pair]
  D --> E[Click Pair]
  E --> F[Move, Merge and Relocate switch on]
  F --> G[Opening a subfolder on one side opens it on the other]

The middle column

From top to bottom:

• Recent — your recent pairings, so you can get back to a pair in one click. Pinned pairings are kept when you choose Clear recent.
• The gear — Data Parking settings: Parallel transfers (1 to 16 copies at once, default 5), the Verification level (see How copies are checked) and the recent-write guard (see When an app is holding a folder open).
• The list button — the history of recorded moves, with Revert for completed ones. See The Moves log.
• The terminal button — Live transfer logs, a line-by-line record of each copy that you can copy for support.
• Home — sends both panes back to their starting folders.
• What each action does — a short explainer of every button.
• The action buttons: Move, Merge and Relocate from left to right, and Move and Merge from right to left. See Move, Merge or Relocate.
• Send here → and ← Send here, which send ticked items into whatever folder the other pane is showing, with no pairing needed. You choose Copy (Overwrite), Copy (Merge), Move (Overwrite) or Move (Merge), and your choice becomes the default. These run as Data Transfers jobs.
• Moves — the live list of moves you started in this window.

See also: Moving folders safely, The shortcut left behind after a move, Relocate.