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External Hard Drive for Time Machine Backup's

marc55

marc55

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 14, 2011
872
283
I just watched a video on YouTube on how to use Time Machine, and the guy used a Western Digital My Passport for Mac.

Question is do I have to use an external drive made specifically for MAC, or will any external HD do the job?

Thank you
 
Anything will work. You'll just need to go into Disk Utility and erase the drive using "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" first.
 
Any drive is good. You just need to partition it to GUID scheme and format to HFS+ Journaled filesystem in Disk Utility before trying to use it for TM.
 
One more question:

My son has a MBA and I want to give him an external HD for Christmas with all the family pictures on it.

The drive will be something like a WD "My Passport", and I will load the jpeg files from my windows based PC.

Will he have any problems copying them onto his MBA?

I figure after he copies them to his MBA, he can then "go into Disk Utility and erase the drive using "Mac OS Extended" which I guess formats the drive for Mac usage?

Thank you
 
I've had trouble with a Toshiba Connivo drive going into power save mode and not waking up for Time Machine. Don't have that problem with a Seagate. I would go with either the WD or Seagate. Any backup drive is better than none.
 
marc55 said:
One more question:

My son has a MBA and I want to give him an external HD for Christmas with all the family pictures on it.

The drive will be something like a WD "My Passport", and I will load the jpeg files from my windows based PC.

Will he have any problems copying them onto his MBA?

I figure after he copies them to his MBA, he can then "go into Disk Utility and erase the drive using "Mac OS Extended" which I guess formats the drive for Mac usage?

Thank you
Click to expand...

No problem at all. You can format in the native Windows NTFS format and the Mac will be able to read but not write to the disk. Or you can format the drive to ExFAT which the Mac and Windows machine can read and write to.
 
marc55 said:
According to this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/message/23559252#23559252, there is an issue between Mavericks and ExFat; sounds like ExFat will not work with Mavericks?
Click to expand...

I believe the issue in that thread is the WD software many Mavs users have had problems with, and not Mavs itself.

priitv8 said:
Dunno. I use exFAT constantly on my thumbdrives. So far no probs in Maverics.
PS You won't be able to make TM backups to exFAT drive!
Click to expand...

Same here... I am using ExFAT on a USB key under Mavs with no issue.
 
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