Here is the situation. I currently have a 100Gb external hard drive off a PC. I want to back this up to another external hard drive. The important things it contains is music and photos. In a couple of months I will buying an apple laptop. I want to have an external hard drive to back up this entire computer, as it will used for school, so I want to back up programs and files on this one.
If I buy a very large external drive, perhaps 1Tb, will I be able to save my current files and then the entire apple computer or am I better off buying two external hard drives, one very small, and one large for the above uses.
Will I be able to copy the contents of the small (pc) external drive to the large (apple) external drive?
If you buy a 1 TB external drive, which probably offers the best value for your money as smaller drives tend not to be much cheaper nowadays, you can quite easily use the system tools in Windows to divide it into two or more partitions of any size you desire, and the computer will see it as two separate drives even though they are on the same physical unit, and files can be copied or moved between them as with any other drives.
So as an example you could have F: Photos at 100 GB and G: Backup at 850 GB or something similar (A 1 TB drive has about 950 GB usable space after formatting, so nothing is lost due to partitioning in itself.). The only drawback is that if the external drive fails, both partitions usually go with it, but then the problem of data recovery is much the same even if there is only one partition on it.
So if I buy a 1TB external and have windows partition it into two physical drives as step one will I have a small partition formatted in NTSB and a large partition unformatted. In other words, when I take this drive to my new and yet to be purchased mac, with the mac have no problem with it or will it see an already formatted drive and get confused?
If I do get two drives, one large and one small will I be able to copy files like music and pictures from the small pc one to the large mac one?
OSX can read from FAT32 or NTFS and then write to FAT32 or HFS+, so you’re fine going from the small PC one to the larger Mac one. Windows cannot write to HFS+ though, so you’d need to wait until you have the Mac.
If your worried about backing up the 100 GB right now, get the 1 TB drive and format it as NTFS (or FAT32 if you don’t have any files larger than 4 GB). Once you get your Mac, copy everything off of the drive and on to the Mac and then format the drive as HFS+ and then move everything back. Don’t bother with this partition stuff.
Oh, right. I forgot Mac’s can’t use NTFS. You should be able to read an UFS formatted drive on both computers, however, since there are Windows tools to read UFS filesystems. I’ll admit it’s a bit more cumbersome than straight plug-and-play, but as long as the drive is only used for storage it should work.
To answer this specifically, yes. The drive will be formatted as either FAT32 or NTFS. Macs and PCs can read/write to FAT32, and according to wiki, macs can read NTFS, but apparantly cannot write to it as yet.
So yes, the mac will almost certainly be able to read the files off the small drive. If you are going to be using the large external drive exclusively on mac, I would format it to HFS+ or whatever they use now.