My 1TB G-Drive does not interact with my 2021 MacBook Pro properly. It's admittedly quite a bit older, so I hope the drive itself is not deteriorating. I'd say I've had it at least a decade or more. But I've treated it well over time and stopped adding to it some years ago.
It mounts, then Finder gives me a grey pinwheel while 'loading' the contents after the drive is selected in the sidebar. Once I can see the contents of the drive in the main Finder window, trying to click or scroll on anything causes Finder to freeze and I get a rainbow cursor pinwheel. So I can *see* the media content. But I cannot interact with it. Finder completely freezes until I force-unplug the drive. Because of the cursor pinwheel, I can't click eject first.
I ran First Aid in Disk Utility multiple times this evening. At first, DU gave me the notice that it could not unmount the drive for repair. Eventually, my very non-coder brain had to channel college CSS class and use Terminal. I was able to force the drive to unmount in Terminal so that Disk Utility could complete the First Aid check. However, the First Aid check came back with no issues.
This is the only external drive that freezes my computer when attached. All other external hard drives cooperate. I use a USB Micro-B to USB-C cord. I'm attempting to get away from these drives for storage purposes and I really want to recover what's on it, especially since I can see the contents. Any help here would be appreciated.
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Which leads me to an ancillary question: My experience has been that external drive-to-cloud transfers are woefully slow, and the reliability of continued connection between the computer and the external drive is tenuous at best. Especially since they're 'OG' external drives and not SSD. I pay for enough Dropbox yearly to basically do away with the 5 drives that I have. But I don't trust the transferring process. Does anybody have any recommendations here as well?
(and as a PS, thank you for not being cranky about tech support questions, unlike another data-saving sub where they literally state in their rules that the /techsupport sub is for people who can't Google. How rude do other subs have to be? I digress, but I am grateful this sub exists!)