Format for backup drive for Mac

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WyomingKnott

WyomingKnott

Legenda in Aeternum
Aug 29, 2006
13,249
3
51,960
I need to get my daughter a backup drive for her Macbook Pro. She's in college, and only backs up current assignments to a USB stick.

Now, despite my 270 Best Answers in the Storage category, I know nothing about what formats an Apple machine can recognize. How does the drive have to be formatted for use on the Mac? Is there a common format that can be shared by Mac and PC?

And does the Mac have good built-in software to backup all her user files or do I need to get some application, or something that comes with the drive?
 
Solution
kenrivers
FAT32 and exFAT will work. Personally, I would go with exFAT because of the 4GB limitation of FAT32. I recently had to reformat a flash drive so move a large file between a PC and a Mac. The file was too large to use with FAT32 so I tried exFAT and had no problem moving the file. Going to run a test just to be sure. Copying a 4.52GB file to the flash drive now. exFAT can be read from and written to on both a Mac and PC.
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Y0GI

Splendid
Jul 22, 2013
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The native file system on Macs is HFS ( Hierarchic File System), however they can also read Fat 32. I'm not sure but MAYBE EX Fat too. Macs can read NTFS but not write to it. I believe that there are utilities that allow Macs to write to NTFS and Windows to read and write HFS.

I don't know about Mac backup S/W.

Yogi
 
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kenrivers

kenrivers

Illustrious
Dec 29, 2010
6,684
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37,015
FAT32 and exFAT will work. Personally, I would go with exFAT because of the 4GB limitation of FAT32. I recently had to reformat a flash drive so move a large file between a PC and a Mac. The file was too large to use with FAT32 so I tried exFAT and had no problem moving the file. Going to run a test just to be sure. Copying a 4.52GB file to the flash drive now. exFAT can be read from and written to on both a Mac and PC.
 
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Solution
Hawkeye22

Hawkeye22

Glorious
Feb 10, 2006
11,442
1
49,065
I second exFAT for cross platform support. That's how I format our external drives at work for use on both Mac & PC. If it's strictly for mac use, use the default HFS/HFS+. For backups, I believe all the newer mac OS's ship with Time Machine which should be able to get you the backups you need.

I'm not a Mac person so there may be other options out there that may work better for you.
 
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