New External mybook...Mac/PC questions

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First off, sorry if Im beating a dead horse, but through searching, Im still not sure what to do. I have a 2 year old Macbook Dual core and just bought a 1TB Mybook because the 500Gig I already have is full with time machine and music. My problem lies in the fact that I have a ton of old scanned pics and a bunch of digitized movies on my old Dell desktop. My questions are about formatting and how to get the stuff off my PC and to my new HD? Do I NEED to partition the new drive, or can I take the new drive, plug it into my PC and transfer all the pics/video, then plug it into my Mac? Thanks for any assitance,
Joel
 
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Also, can I just start putting things on it, or does it have to be formatted first with my mac?
 

chscag

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The new 1TB Mybook is likely already formatted at the factory as NTFS. (You will need to double check it though to make sure.) Which means you can just plug it into your PC and start transferring whatever data you wish.

However, neither a NTFS or FAT-32 formatted drive will work with Time Machine. Time Machine will only back up to a drive formatted as HFS+. It therefore depends on how you want to use the new drive.

If you want to use the drive both as storage and for Time Machine, you'll have to partition it so that one half will remain as NTFS, the other half HFS+. Also keep in mind that without a third party driver, OS X can only read NTFS but not write to it.

Regards.
 

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