Missing Files on Mac Big Sur

[meomkk]

Hello,

I am trying to copy all of my old files from my Windows through an WD external drive, but when I pluggin it in the Mac, it only recognize some of the files. Mac does recognize the external drive.

I have troubleshoot and research in the past hour, first aid, download WD discovery, running complete test, see hidden files, nothing works to show up the missing files on my external drive. I plugged in to my windows laptop to make sure that my external drive doesnt miss any file from there and nothing is wrong on the windows screen. Most of my file is excel, doc, videos from iphone so I doubt the Mac would have an incompatibility issue

Has anyone has this issue? I would really appreciate it for the help and advise

[jebusx]

I’m really confuse. Does your Mac recognize the drive and mount it on the desktop? Or it recognize and mount but when open the drive it only show some files? What is the drive format as on Windows system? Is it NTFS or FAT32 or exFAT?

[meomkk]

yes it recognize the hard drive and mount it. when I open the hard drive it opens, and i waited but the rest of the files would not show up like it in on windows.

I am unsure of the drive formart… how can I check that?

[DonaldKepler]

Let me share my issue which I faced recently. I copied many Word, Excel files from my MBP running macOS High Sierra. I copied the files to macOS Catalina iMac system and later erased the drive. To my surprise the same Word and Excel files are not copied or opening as per my last saved. A lot of sheets are missing in Excel which were present and opening without any issues on High Sierra. I am still struggling to find our the root cause. But perhaps, it might be due to different Office software version!..Coming to your query; try this-

You can check the file format via Disk Utility

• Open Disk Utility from your /Applications/Utilities folder.
• Select the hard drive in the column on the left (usually Macintosh HD).
• At the bottom, you will see Format.