saving to an external hard drive

I got external hard drive to supplement my Apple Mac Mini's very small storage. My intention is to use the external drive for the files I work on daily (I'm a writer) sort of how I was using Dropbox before. But every time I save a file I have open from the external drive, it changes the name to a temp file (i.e. .~WRD3958) and does not save to the master file (if that makes sense). I got in and do "save as" to override the original file, which works sometimes until I hit "save" again and then I'm back in the temp file limbo.

Help! How do I make this stop? What do I need to do to make my external drive function more like my internal hard drive or Dropbox, i.e. save the original file without my having to force it?

Mac mini, macOS 15.3

Posted on Feb 25, 2025 3:24 PM

Top-ranking reply

D.I. Johnson

Level 7

32,873 points

Posted on Feb 25, 2025 3:32 PM

Looks like you did not reformat the drive for use on the Mac. It appears to be using a Windows format. While yes, you can save file to it, you may not use the full length file name features available with newer Windows formats and Mac formatted drives.

You'll need to save whatever files you already have put on that drive to another disk or flash drive and then reformat it.

Preferably you'll reformat it with the APFS format if it's an SSD, or use the Mac OS Extended format if the drive is a rotational hard disk drive. You'll use Disk Utility for this.

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Make sure that after you launch Disk Utility you click View > Show All Devices so that you can select the external drive device itself and not just the volume that would be indented below it.

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saving to an external hard drive

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