G Technology G Drive problem

[gdurkee]

Hi: I'm trying to help a friend -- long distance -- with a G-drive he uses for backup. His last Mac internal drive glitched and had to be replaced. He thought he had backup with his G-drive but the Apple techs said there was nothing on there. He's not very good with computers and just plugged it in via USB and, presumably (but not guaranteed!) followed the instructions to have the time machine work with it.

I'm a PC guy and not hugely familiar with some Mac features. I did log in remotely to his machine using Chrome and using the standard file explorer, looked at the files on the G-drive which showed as being there. When I drilled down through all the folders, the last folder in each set showed as having no files -- I can only see folders and no individual files. It's a 1T drive and shows about 400GB as being free. The last several Time Machine backup attempts give an error message that the drive doesn't have enough space to back up the (new) hard drive.

So, what am I missing? Why can't I see any previous files that should have been backed up pre-crash? Is there a specific g-drive utility I should be using? I notice in another thread that there's problems if this is connected and the computer goes into sleep mode? Is that correct?

I'd appreciate any thoughts or need for more information.

Thanks!

George

 

[mfram]

What kind of filesystem is on the drive? It better be Mac HFS+ or TM wouldn't work with it. If you select the Drive and select "Get Information" (right click or use -I), look at the filesystem. If the filesystem is some kind of DOS or NTFS, then TM wouldn't have been able to use it at all.

 

[gdurkee]

Hi and thanks for the reply. Since my friend uses only a Mac and the G-drive was hooked up only to that machine, I assume the format was Mac HFS+. I'll check but have no reason to suspect otherwise. The only difference was that I was trying to view the drive from a PC through Chrome remote. I don't think there'd be any conflict since I was directing his computer to look at the drive and viewing the results via his machine.

Thoughts?

Thanks again,

George