External hard drive partition mac pc

How to Share an External Drive Between a Mac and a PC

It is good practice to set the Time Machine drive to be at least 2x-3x your primary hard disk size. You can certainly get away with smaller sizes, but because Time Machine takes incremental snapshots of the data on your Mac, the backups will simply capture more data for a longer period of time if the partition size is larger. To be clear, backups will not stop once the maximum space is reached, it will simply rewrite older backups, thus preventing access to old drive states as they become rewritten. Partitioning a drive can take a few minutes, depending on the total capacity of the disk.

Once that process is finished you can quit out of Disk Utility. With the most technical aspects now finished, you can specify the partition to become the Time Machine backup. The default configuration remains unencrypted and excludes nothing, which is satisfactory for many use cases.

Again, the first initial backup process will take quite a while since the entire Mac is being backed up.

Let the entire process run through its course, this may be best done overnight if the primary Mac hard drive is enormous since it can several hours to perform the initial backup. Now that everything is setup you will have one partition automatically serving as the backup drive, and the other accessible as usual through the file system for general file storage of things like movies, large video collections, pictures, media, downloads, or whatever else.

How to differentiate between the two drives? The normal file system storage partition will have a standard orange external drive icon, and the Time Machine partition will have a green icon with the backup logo on it. Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to the OSXDaily newsletter to get more of our great Apple tips, tricks, and important news delivered to your inbox! Enter your email address below:. I want to transfer music files from my mac to a pc or vice versa. Basically will the hard drive work on a pc? Thanks for the article. I recently got an external HD for my Mac and I was wondering for a bit about this…is it necessary that we split it into two partitions?

Can we just create another folder in the 1 Partition HD…? I only ask this as I already did it, but wondered if it by chance hinders anything. You can always create another partition and copy that folder over to it, just takes a few seconds. I got a seagate central that says it supports Time Machine and right now before partitioning I can use both a mac and PC to save and get files. Can I just not reformat it when I create the 2 partitions 1 for time machine back up and the other 1 for storage? Firstly, thank you for the article. I would appreciate some advice. I have purchased a 2 TB external HDD for time machine backup and thought I would use some of the that space as storage of my movies, photos, and music.

I will keep all that on the external HDD, and not on the Mac drive. Thank you. Is it possible to partition after setting up the drive for time machine. I have only done the initial backup but I need to free up some space on my internal drive as well. And if so, can I get time machine to backup my storage partition as well as my internal drive?

Click on options in the Partition tab to select this option.

Formatting instructions

I could read the files on my Mac but the whole drive was read only. Can this second partition for file storage be backed up via the Time Machine as well?

I have so many photographs and I want to move them from my main drive to a backup drive but of course, I still want them to be backed up. If this is not the best method, would you mind pointing me in the right direction? Is it possible to back up my pc to Time Capsul on a dual partition? Do not try to use the Mac Time Machine app to backup to the Windows partition, or vice versa though!

Does The Time Machine work only with external drives? How does Time Capsule works? I have followed these instructions but have hit a snag. If you use both, time machine will take turns backing up to my passport for mac, and time machine backups. I ran into the same issue and have the exact same question!

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Would love some advice! Great article, thank you!

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My advice is never have your general file storage on the same external backup drive as your Time Machine. If you want to use multiple Macs just create a new partition for each Mac, and the partition for the file storage:. Thankyou for you easy to follow instructions. I have two partitions on my external hard drive. At the prompt: Thanks for this! Can I create a partition that is compatible with my interests? Other folders live happily on the same drive — never interfering with each other!

To sum up, what is the advantage to partitioning? Thank you, Larry.

LaCie Rugged USB-C User Manual - Optional Formatting and Partitioning

But your reply is useless, because the scenario blog this post is concerned with is using one external HDD for both backup and file storage on the same MAC. FAT32 being very old technology, and ExFAT not being designed for use in a large disk file storage scenario it was designed for Mobile and Embedded Devices with far smaller storage volumes. I do the same on my Windows Machine. Hi there! Thanks for the useful guide, but I have one problem: Any idea why that could be?

For future visitors: It is much bigger than I need but it was a good price and has good reviews. Is that doable? Thank you for any help you can give. This is the first article I found that is clear. The Mac side also has a fully working Fusion 7: But I use The boot camped windows os exclusively. Its Hdd died. I have installed a new virgin HDD. Any other suggestions! To bad the hdddied after 5 years. Hi, I followed steps 1 to 4 and it has completely erased the drive. So much so I can no longer find it on the Mac.

Yes as the article says it will erase the drive. Anytime you format a drive it is erased. You can now format the drive for Mac compatibility so that it will be used on a Mac http: Check the hard drive you have selected in DU is the one with the model number — not the one that might be below showing the name you first gave the drive. I have a macbook pro running os sierra I used this external to save pictures, videos, work docs, etc. I recently decided to set up time machine to start backing up my computer on this drive after an internal HD wipe scare, and forgot to partition it first and do more research regarding the process of protecting the original files I had already saved to it.

Not finding much help online and crazy waits for Apple Support, so hoping to find a solution sooner. Any help recovering those files is truly and greatly appreciated! Thank you! But if the lost data is encrypted, it will be more difficult to recover. But with that said, even if you use Time Machine on an external hard drive, it should not override any files that are on that hard drive. You can do that without partitioning. Or was the data totally erased? Good luck, let us know what works! Thank you; this is exactly what I am looking for.

I want to use a part of it for Time Machine Backup and the other partition for normal file backups. My question: If I use the above method, will I be able to the second partition to transfer files between my MacBook Air and other Windows computers? If not, what other method works?

Name required. Mail will not be published required. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without explicit permission is prohibited. Enter your email address below: Posted by: Jake says: November 6, at 8: Clive says: November 10, at 1: Elly says: November 25, at 2: November 25, at 3: DQ says: Secondly, the target partition will become unallocated.

Here, you need to choose that partition and click on " Create Partition " from the left action pane. Thirdly, you will see a pop-out window. At the same time, you can also set some other parameters for this partition, including " Partition Label ", " Drive Letter ", " Size And Location ". After that, please click on " OK ". Fourthly, you will go back to the main interface. Then, please click on " Apply " to save these changes. Step 3: Transfer Data back to External Drive. If you want to share files that you have backed up between Mac and PC, now please transfer these files back to external hard drive.

Just transfer all useful files out from the external hard drive to other devices on Mac. Of course, if you have a backup already, ignore this step. Some people may ask why create such partitions on Windows rather than Mac. Please skip to Solution 1: If there is no file saved on your external hard drive, how to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC? Please download and install this program on your Windows computer to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.

Firstly, open the software to enter its main interface as follows. If there are multiple partitions on the external disk, please select the disk and click " Delete All Partitions " feature instead. After that, an unallocated space will be released. Secondly, you can create one or more FAT32 partitions in unallocated space.

Select the unallocated space and choose "Create Partition" feature from the left side. Meanwhile, you can set properties for this new partition and click " OK " to go back to the main window of Partition Wizard. Solution 3: Alternatively, you can create 2 partitions on the external hard drive: As to size for each partition, it depends on your own demands. By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows. Then, select the external hard drive and choose " Delete All Partitions " to create an unallocated space. Here, select the unallocated space and choose " Create Partition " feature from the left action pane.

Now, please specify partition label Windows is recommended , partition type primary or logical , drive letter, file system NTFS , cluster size, and partition size you can change the length of the handle to adjust partition size. Then, click " OK " to continue.

Partition External Drive

Please use the same way to create a FAT32 partition labeled with Mac. At last, click " Apply " button to make all changes performed. Finally, click " Apply " button to make all changes performed. Click to tweet. Well, is it possible to make an external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC without formatting it? Definitely, it is, but third party program is required. Are you planning to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC?

If yes, now try one of our methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC.

• Partition the drive on Windows 10;
• Partition the drive on a Mac!
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