Amid the widespread shift to subscription-based cloud storage solutions, relying on good-old physical drives can be a reassuring sense of independence. Whether you're trying to repurpose an old hard ...

Formatting a hard drive along with the install of a new OS is the best option. The vast majority of operating system installations provide a "format" option as part of the installation process.

For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory. It used to occupy a lot of attention. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying ...

OS X Mavericks is available in the Mac App Store now, but it's only an upgrade—but if you want to do a clean install, you'll need to manually burn an installation flash drive. Here's how to do it.

It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media. Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still ...

Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all ...

In macOS Mojave, you can choose to encrypt and decrypt disks on the fly right from the desktop. Using this convenient Finder option, we're going to show you how to encrypt a USB flash drive (or "thumb ...

It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media. Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about hardware and software YOU need to know about. This article is more than 10 years old. Time to answer a reader's ...