Target Disk Mode

Hey guys, this is Matt Cage 11, and today I'm going to be showing you how to use Target Disk Mode.

Now, if you don't know what that is, basically that lets you see your computer on another computer as basically the same thing as an external hard drive or USB stick. It'll just show up on the computer, will just show up on the desktop, and you can click and drag files and inject the computer and do whatever you want with it. This is a great way to back up data and move data from one way to another.

Now to do this, you need three things. Okay, you need both computers you want to do this to: the computer you want to see it on and the computer you want to be the flash drive. You'll need a FireWire to connect them both.

If you don't know where to get a FireWire, you can get one at the Apple Store, on eBay, or wherever you want. The great thing about FireWire is it's the fastest way to transfer data. With FireWire, you can transfer data at about eight hundred megabytes per second.

And if you don't know how fast that is, that's like really fast. It's like one gig every second. If you want to move data through email or through iChat, you know how annoying it is to wait a long time. So, not with this. You can back up your whole computer in a couple of seconds.

So, there you go. First thing you want to do is connect both computers with the FireWire. So I'm just going to connect it to my iMac. One sec, this is a lot of wires plugged in here. Okay, and now you're going to plug it into your other computer; in this case, my MacBook Pro. There we go.

Now, the next step is to reboot the computer that you want this to happen to, that you want to appear like. In this case, it's going to appear right there. So I'm going to zoom in to where it's been up here. Okay, so I'm just going to click restart, and also I'm going to hold the T button. T stands for Target Disk Mode.

Target Disk Mode is basically the name of this method of transferring data. Now, as you can see, my iMac is restarting, and in a couple of seconds, you'll see, or maybe even a couple—maybe I'm up too many—it's going to load the computer with the FireWire symbol.

Now, also when you reboot a computer, you have several options of things you can hold the key to—impress that many people don't know. You can do Single User Mode, Target Disk Mode, Safe Mode, and many other things.

So, as you can see, it's loaded and made the sound. It's not going to load the Apple sign; it's just going to instead load the FireWire symbol. And as you can see, Macintosh HD loaded there. So, if I just open this up, this is basically my computer, my iMac, and I can just go into Users, John, and then these are all my folders. I can go into my desktop and do whatever I want.

Now, okay, now that when you're done, what you're going to do is eject it. It is very important to eject this; otherwise, you can mess up your computer. There are three ways to eject it. There are three popular ways.

Number one is to click this and press Command + E after Apple eject. The other way is to open a Finder window, and you'll see it right there; you can just click on eject. And the third way, which is the most popular way, is you can just click it and drag it to the Trash can.

As you can see, the Trash can will have an eject symbol, and you can just click eject. Now, when it is ejected, you can unplug this. Hopefully, it won't take as long to unplug as it took to plug in. Here we go, and you can—I'll get this out of the way—just turn this back off and then back on again, holding the power button sweep, and it should reboot normally.

As you can see, it’s going to have the Apple sign in a couple of seconds, and now it'll log in to my account, which I have it set to log into. Now, why is it okay? Why is it important to eject? Because when you have a USB stick, if you don't eject it, the USB stick will get messed up. It's the same thing with the computer; the only thing is a computer is more powerful and more important.

So I'd rather mess up a USB stick that you can replace for ten dollars than a computer that will cost several thousand. So there you go. Now it's back into my account, and whatever is set to open, it's going to open. I can just get out of those.

I hope this helped! Thank you for watching. If you have any other questions, just feel free to comment us, and we love helping you out. Please subscribe. Thank you for watching, and have a nice day!