back up files to use on OS X and Windows.

[Wayne s]

I currently use Time Machine as my back up option and got to thinking, if my iMac gave up the ghost and died on me, what would happen to my 7 years worth of photos, music and other files if I could not afford to buy a new Mac?

You can pick up a PC for next to nothing, so what is the best way to back up your data so it is readable on both systems? I have an old 80gb FAT32 (i know OS X can read and write to FAT32) drive doing nothing and thought about coping the iphoto library onto it but would Windows recognize the file structure of the iphoto library.

Basically, what is the best method (free) to ensure that I could if needed, move all the important files to a Windows based machine?

 

[drummerlondonw3]

well windows will unlikely be able to rebuild your library but the photos, mp3 etc will still exist. Maybe you could write/build a script that copies FROM the library to your fat32 drive and you have a raw copy of everything which would be readable from both machines

 

[Wayne s]

Building scripts goes way beyond my knowledge, as long as I can just backup the basic originals of every thing then I would be happy.

Showing package contents on the iphoto library is one way I thought to save the stuff but, do I save every thing in the package? just the originals or what?

I have one more year of Apple Care left so have plenty of time to get this right.

 

[mac2x]

I personally just copy my iPhoto library onto another (non Time Machine) thumb drive every so often.

To make it readable in Windows, I'd simply copy the photos (originals and possibly edited images too) via Show Package Contents onto a FAT formatted drive, and forget the rest. Windows won't know what to do with the other data anyway.