Get data off old imac

J

JMalone

New member
Feb 6, 2023
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How could one get data from a (very) old iMac? It was my late father's who was an author. It would be lovely to retain his manuscripts and see if there was anything left unfinished as he was ill for a number of years.

I tried plugging a flash drive into it but it wasn't recognized. I don't see any other way to get the files across - the iMac is too old to connect to Wi-Fi.
 
JMalone said:
How could one get data from a (very) old iMac? It was my late father's who was an author. It would be lovely to retain his manuscripts and see if there was anything left unfinished as he was ill for a number of years.

I tried plugging a flash drive into it but it wasn't recognized. I don't see any other way to get the files across - the iMac is too old to connect to Wi-Fi.
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Hi @JMalone - welcome to CF!

When you say the iMac is 'very old' - do you know what version of MacOS it's running, or the model number?
 
JMalone said:
It's an iMac G4
Click to expand...
Wow, pretty old then.

Hopefully it's running Mac OS X rather than Mac OS 9.

My best advice would be to find an older, USB 2.0 USB drive - i.e one with a black rather than blue USB plug.

If you can access another Mac to format the drive, format it to HFS+ using Disk Utility, which you should be able to find in Applications > Utilities.

Hopefully the iMac should be able to read/write to this drive - copy the files over that you wish to keep.
Let us know how you get on!
 
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