Making External drive exclusive site for storage

To any patient soul,

I am a new user of WD external drive for Mac’s.  I am interested in scanning documents onto my computer’s hard drive, copying the same onto the external drive, and then deleting the same from the computer’s hard drive.  This would mean that the only place storing the documents would be the external drive.  When I add new documents to the hard drive that I would like to place on the external drive as above, will the external drive simply copy the computer’s hard drive and erase that which was previously copied, or simply add the new documents to the pre-existing documents?

Crigmont

Hi there, the hard drive alone will do nothing, the one doing the job will be the software/application that you use to manage the copy process. Most backup programs will copy the new files to the drive and leave the originals intact from the computer, while sync applications will erase files from the computer or the drive to make sure the files are exactly the same, then a migration program would move the files to the drive and then erase them from the computer.

however, most of us in here will tell you NOT to do it. The drive has the exact same chances of failing out of the blue as your computer, so if you move all of your files to the drive and then it dies 10 seconds later it’s game over for your data. Try to get a backup, if your data is so important then make sure to keep at least 1 additional full copy somewhere else.