With the release of macOS Monterey, Apple made it possible to pause the copy-and-paste process without losing your progress. This means you can keep using your Mac as usual, then continue the copy-and-paste at a later time. Here’s how it works.
How to Pause a Copying File on Your Mac
To pause the copy-and-paste process, just copy and paste as usual. Then, from the progress window, which shows how much data is being transferred and how much time remains, just hit the Close (X) button. Don’t worry, if you’re running macOS Monterey or later, you won’t lose your copy progress just yet.
After clicking Close, you’ll see a translucent version of the file or folder on the destination location. Once you’re ready to resume copying, just click it. You’ll then be given the option to Finish Copying the item or to Keep the Resumable Copy and finish copying it at a later time.
Before macOS Monterey, anything that caused an abrupt stop to the copy-and-paste process ruined the entire transfer, often requiring you to start transferring from scratch again. With this change, you can pause it indefinitely until you’re in an ideal setup to transfer your files.
Resume Copying When It’s Convenient
Unlike before, you don’t have to restart copying from the start when you stop files being copied. You now have the option to cancel it and pick up where you left off.
Pausing the copy-and-paste process until later can be convenient when you’re about to lose power or when you’re copying multiple files and want to allocate your resources better.
