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veronicarusnak
Participant
January 22, 2026
Question

Best process to migrate photos/library from old external drive to new external drive

  • January 22, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 76 views
Here's my situation:
 
Just bought a new macbook (to replace an old iMac) and successfully restored from old iMac to new MacBook. In both cases, I have two external drives (my drive naming convention is the brandname followed by the date I put it into service).  
 
I'm running Lightroom Classic 15.11 on a MacBook Pro running Sequoia 15.7.3.
 
WDELEMENTS11302024 is my backup drive, and I use TimeMachine as my backup software
LACIE12212018 is where I store ALL my photos
The internal drive (MACINTOSH HD) is where all my software is, as well as where my catalog file (and all my plug-ins, etc.) are stored. That's not going anywhere. 
 
LACIE12212018 is (can you tell by the date) old, slow, and I can just tell it's not long for this world. I'm not getting any errors/problems, but I can just tell and I want to deal with this BEFORE it becomes a problem.  I have about 2.5 TB  of photos on this drive.
 
New external hard drive arrives this weekend. Let's just call this NEWDRIVE for now
 
What is the best way to migrate my whole 2.5 TB library from LACIE12212018 to NEWDRIVE?
 
And for those of you who use TimeMachine, once NEWDRIVE exists, I'll make it one of the drives that TimeMachine backs up, and tell it to stop backing up LACIE12212018, but is there a way to let it know that it doesn't need to keep what it backed up from LACIE12212018 anymore because it's now backing up all that stuff from NEWDRIVE?  
 
 
 

2 replies

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
January 22, 2026

Using your operating system, copy (not move) the entire folder hierarchy (parent folder and all subfolders) that contains your photos on LACIE to NEWDRIVE without modification. Don't go moving folders or photos around or renaming things.

 

Disconnect LACIE. Connect NEWDRIVE and use your operating system to rename it to be EXACTLY the same as the old LACIE was named. EXACTLY. Every character and space(s) is the same in the new drive name for NEWDRIVE as it was in the old drive name.

 

Done. It doesn't get any simpler.

    V
    veronicarusnakAuthor
    Participant
    January 22, 2026

    So, I'm stuck calling my NEWDRIVE the same thing as LACIE, then? I was hoping I could rename NEWDRIVE to comply with my naming convention. Ugh. 

     

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    January 22, 2026

    There are other solutions, which require more effort on your part. How much more effort? That depends on whether or not your photos are ALL stored under one parent folder, or if you have multiple parent folders.

    B
    Bogiebooo
    Inspiring
    January 22, 2026

    I use Carbor Copy Cloner

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