zach_abubeker Posted August 13, 2007 Share Posted August 13, 2007 Hello. I have been using a portable hard drive to store my work. I usually edit at home, in windows, then save the tiffs to be printed at school later. The computer system at school is Mac based and I have had troble saving any files to the drive while using macs. I have also read that they do not like NTFS file systems, so am I forced to backup my drive then format as something else (fat32?). Thanks for your help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Laur Posted August 13, 2007 Share Posted August 13, 2007 Well, just format as FAT32, and leave it that way. Your Windows system should have no trouble also talking to a FAT32-formatted drive. NTFS is nice, but not necessary, if shuffling the data around like that is so central to your workflow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rainer_t Posted August 13, 2007 Share Posted August 13, 2007 -- "so am I forced to backup my drive then format as something else (fat32?)." Yes, NTFS as such is the more save filesystem ... but unfortunately, Microsoft decided not to publish the specifications. So, all implementations that connect an NTFS drive to an OS like MacOS or linux needed to reverse engineer NTFS. Since noone wanted to take the risk, the default for most of these implementations is read-only access. This can be switched off (at least for linux, don't know for MacOS), but that's done on the users own risk. The saver option is FAT32, which is well documented. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dennis Peek Posted August 13, 2007 Share Posted August 13, 2007 I move betweem Mac and Windows. The best solution I found is to install MacDrive software on the Windows machine to enable it to read and write Mac drive formats. Format the HD in Mac OS X extended. I have not seen any problems with this setup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godfrey Posted August 13, 2007 Share Posted August 13, 2007 I have several external drives formatted for shared Mac OS X and Windows use. I format them with Mac OS X to be MS-DOS ... that's FAT32 ... and they work perfectly. Godfrey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zach_abubeker Posted August 13, 2007 Author Share Posted August 13, 2007 Thanks very much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven_clark Posted August 13, 2007 Share Posted August 13, 2007 About the only problem with FAT32 is that it has a maximum filesize that makes XPs built in backup utility choke. I keep two partitions on the drive I use to make backups. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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