Copying Files to Your Mac

When you bring your project home from Chaos to Memories, we suggest copying your files from the USB thumb drive or external hard drive to the internal hard drive on your computer. This way you can access your memories on your computer and keep the delivery drive as a safe backup. Learn how in this short video.

Summary Steps:

1. Connect your USB thumb drive or hard drive to your computer. If you need to connect a rectangular USB-A device to a computer that only has the smaller USB-C ports, then you’ll need a USB adapter. Here are some options:
   • Four-pack
   • 5-inch cable
2. Double-click the MEMORIES icon on your desktop.
3. Click once on the archive folder to select your project.
4. Choose Edit>Copy from the menu bar at the top of your screen.
5. Choose Go>Home from the menu bar at the top of your screen and double-click the Pictures folder.
6. Choose Edit>Paste Item from the menu bar at the top of your screen. The copy will start and can take a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size of your project and the speed of your computer
7. When the copy is complete and the progress bar is gone, click the MEMORIES drive on your desktop to select it.
8. Choose File>Eject from the menu bar at the top of the screen and disconnect the drive from your computer.

Full Transcript:

At Chaos to Memories, we deliver projects on USB thumb drives or solid state hard drives because they’re fast and reliable. After you pick up your project and you bring it home, we suggest copying the files to your computer for easy access and keeping the USB thumb drive as a backup.

The first thing to note is that computers can have two different kinds of USB ports. There’s the original rectangular USB port that’s called USB Type-A, and then there’s the newer USB port that’s smaller and symmetrical, and this is called USB-C. The type of USB ports on your computer will affect how you connect your USB thumb drive or external hard drive to your computer.

If your computer has USB Type-A ports, then you can just directly connect the thumb drive. If your computer has the smaller USB-C ports, you’ll need to use an adapter like this. And if your drive and computer both have USB-C ports, you can just connect it directly.

We format all project delivery drives so they’ll work the same on Mac and Windows computers, so there should be no compatibility issues.

When I connect the USB thumb drive or hard drive, it should mount immediately on my computer as you see here on my desktop. To see the contents of the drive, just double-click on the drive icon. And if for some reason you don’t see the drive on your desktop, you can go to the Go menu in the Finder, choose Computer, find the Memories drive, double-click that, and here you’ll find your family photo archive.

Now copying this project from the external thumb drive or hard drive to the internal drive of your computer is very easy. Just click to select the photo archive folder, go to the Edit menu in the menu bar and choose Copy. So that step tells your computer what files you want to copy.

Now you need to tell it where you want to copy them to. My suggestion would be to go to the Go menu, choose your Home folder, and there are several default folders built into every Macintosh. I would just double click the Pictures folder and copy them here. To complete the process, just go to the Edit menu and choose Paste Item.

As long as you have enough free space on your hard drive, the copy should start and speed along. The time it takes to copy will vary between a few seconds and a few minutes and it depends on the size of your project and the speed of your computer.

When the copy is complete and the progress bar is done, you can eject your USB thumb drive from your computer and access your project from your computer’s hard drive. Click with your mouse or trackpad on your USB thumb drive on your desktop and then choose File>Eject from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

This will safely eject the drive from your computer and it should disappear from your desktop. Now you can safely disconnect the drive from your computer, return it to the box it came, in and store it in a safe place.