Do I want 3 partitions?

[French]

I just purchased a WD My Passport (1 Terabyte) drive that I would like to plug into my router and use as a back up drive AND file storage.

I have a mac with windows installed as well as 2 windows laptops and a windows desktop. I know I need at least 2 partitions (one for Mac and one for Windows)...I assume I can backup multiple windows computers on one partition. But I'm trying to figure out if I need to have a third partition for the storage. Or would I use the same partition I use for the windows backups?

 

[Rowf]

If you want to read and write from both mac and windows I think you will need to format the storage partition to Fat32.
I used this on a 16gb usb key to copy files from windows vista to snow leopard and it worked o.k.
I'm given to understand that ntfs and mac don't play too well together if you want to read and write, although there is a work around from what I've seen on the 'net but I haven't tried it, hence the Fat32 format on my own drive.
It might be as well to leave the thread awhile before doing anything with your new drive and see if a more experienced user can offer you advice on how mac and windows partitions play together.

 

[AdrianK]

What do you mean by "backup" exactly, are you using a tool for this?
If you're just manually copying files across then the folder/partition organisation is entirely up to you.

 

[French]

Thank you for the replies...

What I was attempting to do was to attach a USB drive to my router and then use the USB drive as a backup for all computers in the house (Windows and Mac). For Mac I would use Time Machine...for Windows I hadn't quite figured it out yet.

I have since learned I was expecting far too much out of the hardware I have and left a bit frustrated.

I am using a DLink 655 and while it has the usb port, what wasn't clear is the need for Shareport software...which apparently isn't even actively supported any more and was never created for the Mac.

I did find a "competitor" software (for lack of a better explanation of what it is) and that works great on my mac...but on Windows 7 on the mac it slowed things to a crawl. PLUS I also learned only one connect is allowed at a time so it kind of defeated the whole purpose of what I was going for, which was a drive any and all computers could access at any time to save files, open files, or do backups.

So now I have a 1 terabyte drive that only my mac uses. Oh well...live and learn. Fortunately I already had a NAS drive that all the computers can see and I can manually move files and backups over to that. I was trying to get to an automated backup system across all computers.

In the little research I did it STILL seems Airport Extreme is the only device capable of doing what I want. Ridiculous. And since I have my current router set up the way I need it I really don't feel like starting over at the moment.

So I ended up with 2 partitions. One for Time Machine, and the other for files.