Hide External Drive icon on Mac Desktop On my desktop I have an external drive name 4TB_Drive.  On the same desktop I have a backup drive for the first one named 4TB_Drive_BU.  I'd like to hide the icon to prevent accidentally accessing and changing files there, having it still be accessible to my backup software

When I try and use the routine "chflags hidden" method, I get a "Permissions Denied" response.  All permissions for the drive are R/W.

Any suggestions?
You can hide all external disks from the desktop by opening Finder → Preferences → General and unchecking External disks. Then you can add aliases on the Desktop to the disks you do want shown.