I recently had my old Mac backed up on a WD MyPassport. It’s now connected to my new Mac. How can I see what’s on the MyPassport drive? I need to see if everything I want is on the MyPassport, so I can have the old Mac “wiped clean.” I’m giving it to our science museum for tech classes. Thanks.
If you encounter any difficulties accessing the drive or seeing its contents, ensure that the drive is properly connected, powered on, and recognized by your Mac. In some cases, you may need to install WD software or drivers for the drive, although it should work as a plug-and-play device in most cases.
To access the contents of your WD My Passport drive on your new Mac, follow the below steps:
- Connect the WD My Passport drive to your new Mac using the provided USB cable.
- Wait for a moment to allow your Mac to recognize the connected drive.
- Open a new Finder window.
- In the Finder window, you should see the WD My Passport drive listed in the left-hand sidebar under the “Devices” section. It may appear with the name “My Passport” or “Untitled” if it hasn’t been named before.
- Click on the WD My Passport drive in the sidebar to view its contents in the main window.
Once you’re in the WD My Passport drive, you can navigate through the folders and files to check if everything you want is present. You can open files by double-clicking on them, and you can browse folders by clicking on them.
If you find that all the important files are on the My Passport drive and you’re ready to wipe your old Mac, make sure you have a separate backup of any crucial data on your new Mac or another storage device. Once you’ve confirmed the backup, you can proceed with wiping the old Mac. To securely erase data from a Mac device, you can also opt for a data erasure tool such as BitRaser File Eraser, which helps the user to securely erase data from any storage device, beyond the scope of any recovery.
You need to confirm that the hard drive is properly connected and recognized. Your new Mac should be able to automatically mount the hard drive, but if it does not show up, you may need to check the connection or disk utility.
Next, you need to browse the contents of the backup. If the backup was done using Time Machine, the backup file may be a .sparsebundle file, which may not be intuitive to open directly. At this time, the user needs to be guided to browse through the Time Machine interface, or directly access the Backups**.backupdb** folder on the backup disk. If the backup was done by manually copying files, then just browse the folder directly.
If you are worried about data loss or hard drive not showing up on your Mac, you can read this article.
First, open Finder on your new Mac and look for the MyPassport drive under the “Locations” section in the sidebar. Click on it, and you should see the files and folders stored on the drive.
If the backup was done using Time Machine, your MyPassport will contain a special backup folder named something like “Backups.backupdb.” Inside, you’ll find dated folders with snapshots of your old Mac’s data. You can browse these folders to check if the files and folders you want to keep are there.
If you didn’t use Time Machine but instead copied files manually or used WD’s backup software, then you’ll just see whatever was copied onto the drive in normal folders.
