Once you get the hang of how it works, you’ll be able to do it naturally without giving it much thought. When you eject the drive later, the shortcut will stay on your dock and will work the next time you plug in the drive.Īs you explore your Mac more, you may discover even more ways to copy files to a USB drive. If you want to copy files to it, you can drag them directly to the USB drive’s icon in your dock.

Drag to Dock: If you’d like, you can also drag the icon of a USB flash drive from your desktop or a Finder window into the shortcuts area of your dock.

Whatever you drag onto the drive icon will be copied there automatically. In the General tab, place a check mark beside “External disks” in the “Show these items on the desktop” area. To see the icon there, focus on Finder, then select File > Preferences in the menu bar.

Drag to Desktop Shortcut: It’s disabled by default, but you can make your USB flash drive visible on your Desktop as an icon and drag files onto it.

You can also use the “Copy” and “Paste” commands in Finder’s Edit menu to do this instead of right-clicking. In the menu that pops up, select “Copy.” Then navigate to the USB drive in Finder, right-click in an open area and select “Paste Item.” The items will copy to the drive.

Copy and Paste: Select a file, folder, or group of files, and then right-click.

Here are a few other methods that you might want to try. There are many different ways to copy files to a USB drive on your Mac-we just showed you one of the easiest. RELATED: How to Open Finder with a Keyboard Shortcut on Mac Other Ways to Copy Files on a Mac They will be copied just like with the method above. Navigate to Archive Utility > Preferences.With this window open, you can also open a second Finder window (by clicking File > New Finder Window or pressing Command+N) and drag files from it into your USB flash drive window.You can locate the application manually, but it resides deep in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications. Do a Spotlight search for Archive Utility and launch the app.To access Archive Utility’s preferences, follow these steps: Settings are sparse, but you’re able to alter Finder’s behavior and choose what happens to archived and extracted files. You can also use Archive utility to compress files when needed.Īdditionally, you can change the way Archive Utility behaves by accessing the app’s preferences. A folder with the extracted content will appear in the same location as the original file, if you haven't altered the default preferences. If you created a zip file, it will keep the original file name and add. Click Compress or Compress X Item s in the shortcut menu. Right-click or Control-click the file or folder you want to zip (press Control then click the file with your mouse or trackpad).

This method may be simple, but it does get results. Locate the file or folder you want to zip in the Finder. The simplest way to extract content from a ZIP file in macOS is by using the built-in extraction tool. Open ZIP Files on a Mac Using the Built-In Archive Utility

How to download zip files on a mac