fat32

[maango]

Hi all, I am a proud new owner of a MacBook Pro 15inch Intel Core i7 2,2 GHz, with 4 cores. I am a big supporter of this forum and use it as a go to whenever I need assistance. I have 2 questions;
1) I uploaded photo's from my camera to my mac, and now I want to back them up on my external hard-drive. The photos are not saved in iphoto as I am using Adobe Bridge CS5. I know that generally in order to do this you need to format the hard-drive to be fat32 compatible. The thing is that I don't need to be able to access these pictures on a windows pc (thank goodness!!) and I don't want to lose all the files already save on the hard-drive. Is there an easy way to do this?
2) One of Macbook Pro's the main selling points for me was the fire-wire point. Do I need to buy an external hard-drive that is fire-wire compatible, or do i just need to buy the firewire cable?

Hope you guys can help!!

 

[Bob_Stan]

Can't answer the first part of the question, but as to the second, you need a Firewire capable external drive. It should be Firewire 800 compatible for best performance. If you have the new Thunderbolt port on your portable, that would be even faster, but Thunderbolt capable drives are just appearing and you would pay a premium for them. Firewire 800 is fast enough for my needs.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

1) I uploaded photo's from my camera to my mac, and now I want to back them up on my external hard-drive. The photos are not saved in iphoto as I am using Adobe Bridge CS5. I know that generally in order to do this you need to format the hard-drive to be fat32 compatible. The thing is that I don't need to be able to access these pictures on a windows pc (thank goodness!!) and I don't want to lose all the files already save on the hard-drive. Is there an easy way to do this?

It is not necessary to format an eternal drive in FAT32 for use with OS X. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is the preferred file system (aka HFS+) and far more robust than FAT32. You should only use FAT32 if you need to share with a Windows PC, and even then that drive shouldn't be the sole repository of your files due to the relative unreliability of FAT32 vs HFS+ or NTFS.

 

[bobtomay]

1) You haven't told us what format the drive is now. Will "assume" it is NTFS since you're asking. I'm still recommending the $20 Paragon NTFS for Mac as the most reliable.

 

[maango]

1) You haven't told us what format the drive is now. Will "assume" it is NTFS since you're asking. I'm still recommending the $20 Paragon NTFS for Mac as the most reliable.

Im not sure what the format of the drive is at the moment, but it was originally used on a windows7 pc (Sorry for the ignorance). Thanks everyone for the help/advice. Appreciate it!

 

[chscag]

You can find out easy enough. Attach it to your Mac and open Disk Utility from Applications, Utilities. Disk Utility will identify the format.

 

[vansmith]

You can also right click the drive > Get Info > Format.

I'm going to echo lifeisabeach's suggestion. If you can, copy the files elsewhere temporarily and format the drive as HFS+. Once that's done, copy the files back to your newly formatted drive. I suggest this because although NTFS drives can work, there's little point installing software and possibly putting up with the issues that may come up with using it.