Use Your External Drive On Multiple Computers
November 14, 2008 – 5:55 am
I have written several articles about the importance of backing up your computer. It always tickles me when people say that they don’t have anything important on their home computer so they don’t need to back it up. If that is what you are thinking, stop for a minute and imagine that your hard drived just died or someone stole your computer. Do you have an address book on your computer that has the addresses and telephone numbers of your friends and family. How about your e-mail address book or your browser bookmarks? Do you still have all the disks to replace your favorite video games? Do you have Quicken or some other financial record keeping software on your computer? Are you beginning to get the picture?
The bottom line is external hard drives are cheap and convenient so there is no reason not to use one to back up your computer regularly. You can also use them to transfer files between computers if you are aware of a couple of little issues.
Hard drives use different formating systems to store and organize files. The most common are FAT32, NTFS and HFS Plus (also known as Mac OS Extended).
NTFS (New Technology File System) is the standard for newer Windows-based systems running Windows 2000 through Vista. The standard format for Macs is HFS Plus (Hierarchical File System).
If you want to use your external drive on between multiple PCs or between multiple Macs you are golden. But if you have one Mac user and one PC user in your house, you have a small problem. I recommend that you just throw the PC user out of the house but if that isn’t possible there are a couple of work-arounds.
Windows does not recognize the Mac’s HFS Plus-formatted hard drives. Macs will recognize NTFS-formatted hard drives but you can only read the data, not change it or save files to the drive. There is a software program named Paragon NTFS for Mac that will make NTFS drives fully usable but it will cost you $40.
As an alternative to buying new software, just format your new drive using the FAT32 (File Allocation Table) system. The good news is that both Macs and PCs can use this FAT32. The bad news is FAT32 limits the size of your file to 4GBs. For most folks that isn’t an issue but if you mess around with videos, it can be a real problem.