Taking advantage of Amazon.com's S3 - AWS Import/Export Service

[m021478]

I currently use Amazon S3 for online backup purposes in combination with JungleDisk.

Amazon just opened up their previously closed 'beta-only' Import/Export Service, in which they allow you to mail them a hard drive full of data that you would like to have backed up on Amazon S3 and they will locally transfer that data to your online storage 'bucket', saving you (potentially) months of time that it would have taken you to manually upload that data!

One thing I took note of in the 'Supported Devices' section of the new service's homepage was that the File System Types of Hard Drives that they support include NTFS, FAT32, ext2, and ext3. It didn't appear to list any that where Macintosh Native File System Types (such as Macintosh OS Extended, etc...)

Can someone please let me know how a Mac user can reformat a hard drive in any of the aforementioned File System Types so that I can fill it with data and send it off to Amazon for online backup?

Thanks!

 

[BlueRevolution]

Disk Utility can format drives to FAT32, or NTFS if you have MacFUSE and NTFS-3G installed.

 

[m021478]

So you saying that either MacFUSE or NTFS-3G would be required to format the drives properly?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Both are required to format the drive to NTFS. You can format to FAT32 without any extra software.

 

[m021478]

So you're saying that in Disk Utility, the option to format as MS-DOS (FAT) actually formats a volume as FAT32 (and not just FAT, which I believe is limited to files no larger than 4GB in size)...

Is this correct?

 

[BlueRevolution]

So you're saying that in Disk Utility, the option to format as MS-DOS (FAT) actually formats a volume as FAT32 (and not just FAT, which I believe is limited to files no larger than 4GB in size)...

Is this correct?

Almost. All FAT filesystems, including FAT32, are limited to 4 GiB per file. FAT32 merely allows the use of larger drives.