dasher

Hi, one for the Mac guys i hope.

I thinking of getting an external hard drive to back up/store files from my MacMini & PCs (and hopefully tomorrow (Tues) my new MacBook also arrives).

The question is, will i need to partition it separately for the two files systems, or can the Mac & PCs see it as one drive accessible to all. Ideally i want all my MP3s, movies and documents backed up in one place.

Cheers, Daz

Simon C

I have a Formac (sourced through our resident mac reseller )

Its connected to the windows box and I can access it off the mac cos I've enabled it as a shared drive under windows. No probs wiyth it, formatted under windows, mac read and writes to it no probs.

dasher

Ahh, yes i could do that and access it as a shared drive through my network, but i was wondering if i could just connect it separately to each computer, that way i wouldn't have to have more than one switched on.

Cheers, Daz

Markus

You've got various choices as to what you want to do.

1) You could format the drive as HFS+ Journaled on the Mac. HFS+ is the native mac disk format, so the mac will play with it quite happily. Alas the PC does not understand HFS+ so you'd not be able to access the drive from a PC unless you either network the drive, or you could install MacDrive, which allows PC's to read HFS+ disks.

2) Format the drive as FAT32. This will allow the PC and Mac to access the drive. Good for PC, not so good for Mac as I'm pretty sure mac specific info such as resource forks (not really used in a pure OS X environment, but legacy apps will use them) and more importantly ownership/permission information will be lost when copied to the FAT32 formatted drive. You can't use NTFS as although the Mac will mount NTFS, it's mounted as Read-only, not much use for copying files.

You cannot currently have a disk with a Mac and PC volume on it, because you have to choose between GUID/APM or MBR for the partition table. If you choose the former it's Mac only, if you choose the latter it's PC only, and as mentioned above, information can be lost when copying over Mac files.

All might not be lost however. If you're backing up data, then it's possible a backup program, such as Retrospect, will allow you to have a FAT32 partitioned disk attached to a Mac and when it backs up data from a Mac, it will preserve ownership/permissions. The same software could be used to back up the PC's as well. I think there is a free trial download of Retrospect available to allow you to see if ths will work.

RichB

Just as a side point, you could look at getting NAS (Network storage) not that expensive now, essentially a disk with Ethernet in it. I think they do have a USB interface too. HOWEVER a friend of mine bought a Lacie drive and it wasn't that great, he actually doesn't use it now...

I am guessing you are trying to avoid having to unplug from one into the other each time... You are still going to have to decide which format method to use though...

Simon C

Markus, I've just checked. All my network drives are formatted to NTFS and my mac (OS X) read and writes to them just fine.

Markus

Simon,
Ah, I should have made myself clearer. I was talking about a physical internal/externally connected drive, say one in a USB enclosure. If that drive was formatted as NTFS then you'd see it as read-only. You'd see this if you installed bootcamp on your Intel Mac and viewed the partition you created via the Mac, it'd be mounted, but read-only.

Network mounted will be fine as it'll be mounted via AFP/SMB. However, if SMB then what I mentioned about resource forks and ownership/permissions does still hold true.

Blackscooby

I bought a Seagate external drive for storage on my MacBook. It would write to it fine whilst formatted FAT32 which is how it's shipped. However it wouldn't write "large" files over a certain size. Can't remember the size limit right now.

Reformatted HFS+ and works well. To transfer files between Macbook and PC I used FTP. Basically the external drive just has an image of the Macbook and MPEG's I've kept off TV for stuff I haven't watched yet.. Lost S2 etc !

dasher

Cheers guys for your replies,

I think i'll just format it as a Mac drive, and access it from the PCs through the network. My medium term plan is to migrate virtually totally to the Macs (I only use the PCs for AutoCAD and Half Life. Come on Autodesk, i'm sure theres a market).

Cheers, Daz

Markus

If you have an intel Mac then you can dual boot it into XP/OS X, so you could cut down the number of machines you have.