Portable HDD drives

[kblake]

Hi,
I got my iMac in march this year 21" i5 12gig ram and I am NOT going back to Window EVER lol...
I have kept everything in Apples stock file structure & folders with the exception of my iTunes library which is on a separate portable hdd.

Regarding back up.. I have 4 portable hdd
1/ 500gig portable hdd for Time Machine (exclusively) (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2/ 750gig iTunes + Photo & Documents back up (Fat32)
3/ 500gig Carbon Copy Cloner back up (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
4/ 500gig Photo & Documents back up (Fat 32)
Call me paranoid but I have too many photos to lose lol.....

Basically my question is since I am not going to be using an Pc's would I benefit by formatting my portable HDD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or leaving it as Fat32?

Love Carbon Copy Cloner boots straight from the portable hdd nice peace of mind..

Thanks

 

[SR20DETDOG]

Unless you will be wanting to put any files larger then 4GB (FAT32's limit) on the FAT32 formatted drives then you don't really need to.

FAT32 has the advantage of being able to be written to by both OSX and Windows, whereas only OSX can read/write to extended journal (aka HFS+).

Personally I keep my Time Machine HDD and Clone HDD as HFS+ and everything else is formatted as NTFS. There are programs out there that will allow OSX to also write to NTFS formatted drives.

But like I said, unless you'll be wanting to put files greater than 4GB on the HDDs I wouldn't bother reformatting them, simply to save on time and effort.

Hope this helps