Good evening, all. Some of you may remember recently I was looking into buying a friend's Macbook (I'm still considering it).

Same friend has a bunch of photos stored on an external hard drive. She uses that drive with a Samsung laptop.

At the same time, she's trying to move a bunch of photos from her Macbook to an external drive. Evidently she can't use the same external drive. That part, I understand (I think), due to PC/Mac format differences. (Am I correct?)

At this point, it looks like she has to get a Mac-format external drive. No sweat there, as I bought one while I was working on her machine. I'll just give her this one.

If she wants to consolidate her photo backups onto one external drive... then what? All I can think of is to copy the files on the PC-format external drive to DVD, then put that DVD into the Mac and copy files to the Mac-format external drive. That brings my first question: will a DVD burned on PC be readable by a Mac?

Next question: is there a better solution than PC->DVD->Mac?

As always, I thank you.

Macs & PC's can read & write to drives in FAT-32 format, no need to buy a Mac specific drive. Should she want a Mac only format, she can buy any drive, hook it up to her Mac, use Disk Utility app to format as a Mac only drive.

Disk Utility help.

I think I see where you're going, Mr. Bill, but she doesn't want to have to reformat her existing drive (and lose all its contents).

But if we bought a new drive and formatted it FAT32 (can you do that with a terabyte drive?), then it would work on both machines?

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
I think I see where you're going, Mr. Bill, but she doesn't want to have to reformat her existing drive (and lose all its contents).

But if we bought a new drive and formatted it FAT32 (can you do that with a terabyte drive?), then it would work on both machines?

I have formatted an external 250GB SSD in FAT32. It took a few hours. I had to do that to use it with my Android HU and it works fine with a PC, too.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
I think I see where you're going, Mr. Bill, but she doesn't want to have to reformat her existing drive (and lose all its contents).

But if we bought a new drive and formatted it FAT32 (can you do that with a terabyte drive?), then it would work on both machines?

It should.

What about a USB jump drive? Could that be formatted FAT32 and used for the file transfer?

As it's a solid-state thing, would formatting take less time than a standard HDD? (Per GB, that is... I'm not aware of a quickly-available terabyte jump drive.)

Windows generally limits FAT32 partitions to 2T in order to push NTFS. OSX can read and write to NTFS but it's not enabled default. Max file size on FAT is 4Gb.

quote:

Originally posted by zoom6zoom:
Windows limits FAT32 partitions to 32Gb

So, would I be better off to just get a 32GB jump drive and use it for the transfer? (Rather than try and format a terabyte drive, that is.)

sorry, I had conflicting information on the partition size. It used to be 32Gb. But if she doesn't have a lot of files, yeah a thumb drive is likely the simple way.

I'll find out tomorrow how much she's got on the PC-based drive. Thank you for the guidance!

Does your friend have a Google account? If yes, get her laptops on a good (i.e. fast) internet connection and have her upload all her files from both external drives to Google Photos. Her Gmail/Google account gives her unlimited storage in Photos, so why not take advantage of it. Once there she has access to her pics in any number of ways, and can download whatever she might want to any recipient device. As an additional benefit, she'll end up with an offsite backup of everything so she need not worry about losing anything if one of her systems takes a dive.

Google account: I'll check on that.

I'm afraid her ISP may be the issue there... s-l-o-w connections over there.

If it’s just photos, why not copy them to an Amazon account...photos are free. It may take a while, but pretty simple to do.

Some one help my memory here...
Can't recall the details, but it used to be that the Mac could read some PC formats but couldn't write to them. Have you tried the PC external on the Mac to see if you can copy the photos on it to the Mac? If that works then it's simply a matter of copying all the photos to a new Fat32 formatted drive.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Good evening, all. Some of you may remember recently I was looking into buying a friend's Macbook (I'm still considering it).

I remember your topic well since I bought that 13" Macbook Pro on Swappa mentioned in your topic that I found while helping you decide upon a reasonable price. (For $500, that was a very good deal.)

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Same friend has a bunch of photos stored on an external hard drive. She uses that drive with a Samsung notebook.

At the same time, she's trying to move a bunch of photos from her Macbook to an external drive. Evidently she can't use the same external drive. That part, I understand (I think), due to PC/Mac format differences. (Am I correct?)

As best that I can tell, you are not correct. If the drive used with the Samsung laptop is formatted in MSDOS FAT or ExFAT, then it can be read or written to by OS X / mac OS without need of reformatting. If the drive used with the Samsung notebook is formatted in NTFS, then it will need to be reformatted to be used with a Mac.

To find out it if the drive used with the Samsung notebook is compatible with the Mac, just plug it in to the Mac and find out. If the drive mounts, then it is formatted in FAT or ExFat. If not, you will need to find a solution.

I've made screen grabs about using Mac OS's DiskUtil, but I am holding off on posting them until you try just plugging the drive into the Mac.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Next question: is there a better solution than PC->DVD->Mac?

That should not be necessary. For the Macbook Pro that you led me to buy on Swappa as a Christmas gift for my mother, I just uploaded her photos to Amazon Prime Photos from her Toshiba notebook since I did not have a spare USB 3.0 drive handy at the time.

Also, reformatting drives on Mac OS / OS X takes a matter of seconds, not minutes or hours. Copying photos to any drive will take longer, but the Mac that you are interested in has USB 3.0 ports, so it shouldn't take hours to copy photos to it unless the external drive is a spinning disc (not-SSD) and you wanting to copy well beyond the suggested figure of 32 GB of data.

Good morning, rh. I'm glad the Swappa deal came out well for you (and thank you for the price reference).

I believe Ms B has tried plugging the PC-based external drive to her Mac already, but I'll check when I hear from her today.

Uploading photos to the cloud might be a good option, but I'm not sure about her connection speed. (We're not all high-speed and fiber here in East Boofoo.)

I know she has a lot of pictures, but so far I can't imagine it being more than a collection of more than 32GB. Perhaps I'll grab a 32GB jump drive and drop it off today.

Another thought: Suppose I grabbed a simple network switch and connected her Samsung and her Mac to that switch. If I then made the PC-format external drive a shared folder, would the Mac be able to read from it over the network? Or do Mac and PC not play well on the same network?

 
I would keep all the data on the drive attached to the Mac, in Mac format. Then share the Mac drive and copy from the Windows machine over your local network. Both machines being cabled to your network would be a big help. Also very helpful is if both external drives are attached to their respective machines with USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 would be painfully slow, no matter the method you use).
 
New Mac OS versions default to sharing using SMB, which is Windows compatible, but if you have an older OS version, you might want to check to make sure it is SMB and not AFP. In System Preferences/Sharing, when you turn Sharing on there is an Options button, and that's where you will find those choices.
 

This discussion brings up a question I have been mulling over, I just bought a thumb drive with the explicit intentiom of using it to transfer
pictures and document and music files from PC to Mac. Is this going to work or do I need to check on other avenues? As always thanks ahead of time for any suggestions.

The only jump (thumb) drives that I have ever reformatted were done so that I could create an OS X installer (& recovery) drive. My drives came formatted as FAT drives (largest jump drive I have is 128 GB), so that should work.

Flash/thumb drives are all formatted in FAT by default, I believe, and can be read and written to by both PC and Mac without formatting.

They are so cheap now that it's not worth reformatting an old drive for this purpose.