switching from XP to Mac, how to do

Hi,

 

I have a question if I want to switch from Windows XP to a Mac... All my images

reside on an external drive (LaCie firewire drive), which is i guess formatted

in NTFS... Now if I switch to a Mac, how can I retrieve these images? Can it

read the NTFS system to get all the images off it? Or do I need to do something

else (consider that burning to DVD is not practical, I have some 80.000 images

of assignments shot over the years, backed up onto seperate external HD's, all

NTFS)

 

Same goes for my lightroom library, can it be used as is?

 

many thanks

your mac can read your external drives with an NTFS format. However, it cannot write to it

(reliably at least). What you will want to do is connect your external drive to the mac and

then copy the images to an internal drive (or another external drive), reformat the Lacie with

HFS+ and then move your images/libraries back.

 

I cannot answer your lightroom question. I would imagine that you could use it, but I have

no actual experience to back it up.

Many external hard drives were formattted with FAT 32 when shipped, and are already compatible with both Windows and MAC. If you are not sure what you have, the first thing would be to find out. If it is really NTFS, then setting up a local network from the old to the new computers to transfer the data to reformatted drives would be quite easy. If you have multiple external drives, convert them one-by-one to the new format as you transfer the data.

As said above, out of the box the Mac can read but not write NTFS. To me this sounds like the perfect occasion to get an extra read-only backup copy, by hooking up the NTFS drive once, copying the contents to a new external drive formatted for the Mac, and then retiring the old drive, as a backup you can't accidentally overwrite.

What they said, though I might add - If you only have 1 copy of your data which is on the

external drive, I wouldn't format the external drive immediately after copying the data,

because that's inviting disaster. What I would do is make a copy of the data on your

internal drive (assuming you have space), THEN MAKE ANOTHER BACKUP - either buy or

borrow another USB or FireWire external drive and use that to make another backup before

finally reformatting the external drive and copying your data back. This will take extra time

to do, but if your data is important...

 

I read that the lightroom libraries are compatible, but I haven't seen any real world tests

yet. Besides, it doesn't really matter that much because with lightroom you are still able to

get at your images in the normal way if you had a problem (browsing through the folders I

mean).

Thanks for all the asnwers above!

 

Basically what i need is the Mac to read the NTFS, and then store the images on another (new) external drive in a Mac format...

 

I have 2 exact copies of each drive (you never know), so i can tamper with one and leave the other backup intact in case something goes wrong

 

It's gonna take some time, but it looks like it is feasible without too much trouble

 

anyway, thanks a lot for all your help!

Best o f luck with the transition. Without wantin to inflame this happy conversation into a pc vs mac debate, let me just say as a 6 month switcher from XP to OSX, (life lonf windows user) i can say that the experience has been absolutely fantastic. I love the simplicity, looks and reliability of OSX and will never go back to windows. Enjoy!