USB HDD files from Pc to Mac

ecksmen · 6 Oct 2011 at 20:59

I need to help a friend out. I backed up his old failing USB drive to my server (2008). He's bought a Mac and a 1TB mac formatted USB drive.

So now its the whole NTFS / FAT32 vs MAC file format issue, or has things changed now?

I can format the drive, but then he needs to be able to read the data and I don't want to castrate the drive to fat32 and 4GB max file size (just seems too small) plus other issues he may incounter.

Any ideas?

ecksmen · 6 Oct 2011 at 21:42

Using macdrive and writing to the usb drive.

Arthur17 · 9 Oct 2011 at 23:37

ecksmen said:
So now it's the whole NTFS / FAT32 vs Mac file format issue, or has things changed now?

Have you considered ExFAT? This file-system is readable and writable on Windows XP + KB955704 / Vista / 7 / 8 and Mac OS X from 10.6.5 onwards.

MagicBoy · 9 Oct 2011 at 23:58

OS X will read NTFS just fine.

Arthur17 · 10 Oct 2011 at 01:47

As long he doesn't need to write data to the drive on the Mac, then NTFS would be fine too (as MagicBoy mentioned).

If he does, he will need to buy a copy of NTFS for Mac from either Paragon or Tuxera (or use the free NTFS-3G which isn't as good).

www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

MagicBoy · 10 Oct 2011 at 01:56

Depends on the capacity of the data he backed up. If the new Mac has a big enough drive he could conceivably restore the files from the NTFS drive then reformat the 1TB external as HFS+, which would allow use for Time Machine backups etc.

I'd be a bit nervous about betting all my data on an open source NTFS bolt-on.

I've got Paragon installed on this Mac which came free on a coverdisk a few years back. It's old but has been reliable when I've needed it.

dav3evans · 11 Oct 2011 at 10:42

Arthur17 said:
As long he doesn't need to write data to the drive on the Mac, then NTFS would be fine too (as MagicBoy mentioned).

If he does, he will need to buy a copy of NTFS for Mac from either Paragon or Tuxera (or use the free NTFS-3G which isn't as good).

www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

NTFS-3G is also 32 bit only. Or it was the last time I checked. You can boot a Mac into 32 but mode but personally I wouldn't really want to.

I've used Mac Drive on PC and Tuxera NTFS on Mac and have found them both to work perfectly well...and to get a working function without worrying about the 4GB file limit it's a reasonable cost imo.