First, plug your USB flash drive into an available USB port on your Mac. Give your Mac a moment to recognize it and make it available in Finder.

• Next, click the Finder icon in your dock to bring Finder to the foreground. Finder is your Mac’s built-in application for handling files, and it’s always running.

In a Finder window, look in the sidebar on the left side of the window. (If you can’t see the sidebar, select View > Show Sidebar from Finder’s menu bar at the top of the screen.)

If your USB drive has been recognized, it will be listed there in the “Location” section. In our example, the drive is named “Mac Transfer,” but it could be named anything. You’ll know that it’s a removable drive because it will have a tiny “eject” icon beside it.

Next, using a Finder window, browse to the location of the files that you’d like to copy to the USB flash drive. When you locate them, drag them to the USB flash drive name in your sidebar.

After dragging the item or items to the drive in the sidebar, you’ll see a copy progress indicator window. This window gives you an estimate of how long it will take to finish the copy process. If you need to cancel the copy operation before it completes, click the tiny “X” in a circle. Otherwise, just let the process finish.

After that, click the name of the USB flash drive in your sidebar, and you’ll see the contents of the USB flash drive. If the copy process finished properly, the items that you just copied will be listed there.