Help with seagate back plus for Mac and PC

In my experience, the drive itself is formatted NTFS.

NTFS is read only on a Mac, so you can view your files, but you cannot modify, delete or add new files. That installer I believe allows your Mac to be able to read and write to the NTFS drive, but I'm not 100% sure as I did not install it. I think the installer also includes some way to be able to back up your Mac's internal HDD, as you won't be able to use Time Machine to do so (TM requires an HFS+ drive).

What I ended up doing was copying the files from my Windows PC to the hard drive, then move them temporarily to my Mac's HDD and format the external as HFS+

HFS+ allows your Mac to read and write to the HDD natively, but moreover it allows you to use Time Machine to make regular backups of your Mac. Once it's formatted HFS+, you can move all of the files back onto the drive from your Mac.

A precaution though, any files stored solely on the external will need to be backed up via another method. Also, your PC will not be able to read the HFS+ formatted drive. There may be programs that allow Windows to view HFS+ HDDs but again, I'm not sure. I'd assume that since you plan on getting rid of your PC this won't be an issue, but if you have other Windows machines that will be accessing that HDD you may not want to reformat the drive.

 

Glad I could help