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External drive to back up a mac & a pc.

AndyK

AndyK

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 10, 2008
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Terra
I'm looking for a backup solution for my PC desktop & mackbook.

I need around 500gb of storage. An archieve search yielded this thread but it didn't turn out to be overly usefull.

Is there a way around the partition / formatting compatibility issues so I can use one drive for both machines?

If possible I'd like to avoid backing up over my wireless network. My itunes of 10.5k songs takes so long :(
 
If you use time machine then it will format the drive to HFS+ which isn't recognised by windows. However, if you install these drivers then windows will be able to read the HFS+ drive.
 
The driver partitions need not be the same format. Partition it in two, make one of them FAT32 and one of them HFS+ and you will be able to use the FAT32 part on both OS X and Windows and the HFS+ part on OS X for Time Machine.
 
neiltc13 said:
The driver partitions need not be the same format. Partition it in two, make one of them FAT32 and one of them HFS+ and you will be able to use the FAT32 part on both OS X and Windows and the HFS+ part on OS X for Time Machine.
Click to expand...

Just bare in mind with this you wont be able to back up over 4GB from the PC if it is FAT32.
 
Would it work to do one half HFS+ and the other NTFS?

The formats don't need to be able to cross over really. It's literally a pure "oh crap my hard drive has died" back up. I wont be using the driver other than once a week to fully back up data.
 
I really don't want to be paying -more- money if there is a solution I can use for free.

Will formatting a 1tb drive in two 500gb chunks, one FAT one NTFS work?
 
I installed macfuse and ntfs-3G , after installing both, ntfs is no problem for my mac. BOTH ARE FREE
I do think you need to have both installed.
 
In the end I came to realise I would never have any individual files that ever got close to 4gb so I formatted it as FAT32 to avoid messing around with software for the quick hassle free solution!

Thanks for all the ideas / comments however !

If anyone is interested, I bought a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition & it is awesome.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000W9RNOA
 
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