my laptop and my new external drive

I ducked out of work and visited the computer-repair guy.  He gave me back my laptop, commenting on a broken piece of the structure that undergirds the plastic "command" key.  He said he didn't have the part in question, and that I'd have to visit a Mac service center to get the repair done—an action that would end up costing me a lot of money because the Mac team would end up repairing/replacing the entire keyboard, not just the one key.  What the hell?  Anyway, I shrugged and half-joked that I could make my own temporary repair for free by using tape to stabilize the errant key.  

The repair guy also presented me with my spanking-new external hard drive (whose capacity I no longer remember... I'll have to check what it is), which is housed in a sleek, black box.  Unlike my nifty 750GB external drive (thanks again, Hahna!), which simply plugs into my computer's USB port, this new drive is much larger and requires a power source to operate.  Not a big deal.  I'll get used to having another drive on my desk.

My plan is to unload all the data from that drive to my laptop, and from there, I'll load all the data onto my 750GB drive, whose huge capacity still remains mostly untested:  even after dumping a load of data into it over the past several years, I've barely reached a tenth of the drive's storage capacity.  750 gigabytes is most of the way to a single terabyte, and I can't imagine what I'd do with a full terabyte of storage.  At a guess, the people who store terabytes' worth of information are probably downloading (or making!) HD-quality movies—tens or hundreds of titles.  Not me:  almost all of my purchased movies are stored in the Cloud (with Amazon Prime, I have no choice; with iTunes, I have an option to download or to Cloud-store each film).  That way, I can save my storage space for other things.

I haven't plugged in and activated my new/old hard drive yet.  There are files on there—including a video of Mom before she died—that I want to see, to recover, and to store, somehow, in a safer, permanent manner.  Wading through all that old data (my Mac desktop died in 2014, so it's been a while) is going to be very distracting and, if I find more files like Mom's video, very emotional for me.  We'll see what happens.  I'll be setting up the hard drive right after I finish this post.  Wish me luck.

UPDATE:  Alas.  My computer can't read the data on the external hard drive.  This isn't surprising:  the hard drive comes from a 2009-era Mac, and the Mac OS has undergone many, many iterations since 2009.  My current OS is Mac OS Mojave (10.14.6), which was released in 2018.  In 2009, the OS was 10.6 Snow Leopard, back when Mac was naming its OSes after big cats.  That's a difference of eight iterations.  Back-compatibility can go only so far, and for Mojave to read data on a Snow Leopard OS, it's like going on an archeological expedition for items with inscriptions written in a language that few modern scholars would understand.  

All is not lost, of course:  when I do finally take my laptop to a Mac service center to get the "command" key fixed (and, possibly, the rest of the keyboard), I'll bring along my new/old hard drive and ask whether the data from it can be pulled out and placed on, say, a high-capacity thumb drive.  I'm kicking myself, though, for not having asked the repair guy whether he'd bothered to check the accessibility of my data after he'd converted the old 2009 hard drive to a new external drive.  Damn.