back up problems

Hi All.
New to this Forum and although ive owned a Mac for over a year, feel I'm very new to Mac's to.
Having spent a great deal of time trying to connect a Buffalo Link station to my Mac, I have " I think" managed to get my time machine working and to make a backup to the link station.
However Im unable to just drop files straight onto the link station via drag and drop.

I have also connected an old Iomega drive directly to the mac via supplied cable, which i used with my old pc, in order to transfer some file's from my Mac desktop to the drive via that. neither of which works.

Im told by a friend, the drives need to be formatted to the MAC! im not sure this is correct, I can plug a USB stick into either my Mac or my PC and it accepts that fine. why is a drive any different?

any thought shared are greatly appreciated. please keep the tech babble to a minimum though thanks
Trev

First I would decide which drive you are going to use as Time Machine back-ups and use it only for that purpose it was never intended or set up for drag and drop it will make a backup of everything.
Yes and drive you need to write and read from needs to be formatted to the OS in this case for your Mac it needs to be Extended (journaled) this can be done using Disk Utility in your Applications Folder.
If the drive is formatted to Fat 32 then all OS's can read and write to it with a limitation of 4GB single file size on Windows.

Thanks OSXX
for your reply, I still access my 2nd drive on occasion via my pc and it still holds all my old backups, so I'm assuming i couldn't format that drive to FAT32 (though i cant think what else it would be formatted to) Would i be able to partition a portion of either of my 2 drive, and format that as required? as I now have data on one, and my time machine backup on the 2nd.

Thanks again for your time and advice.
Trev

TrevUW said:

Thanks OSXX
for your reply, I still access my 2nd drive on occasion via my pc and it still holds all my old backups, so I'm assuming i couldn't format that drive to FAT32 (though i cant think what else it would be formatted to) Would i be able to partition a portion of either of my 2 drive, and format that as required? as I now have data on one, and my time machine backup on the 2nd.

Thanks again for your time and advice.
Trev

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The PC probably needs to stay NTFS to use as backup and disc image and if I am not mistaken Mac's can usually read these but cannot write to them without third party software.

osxx said:

The PC probably needs to stay NTFS to use as backup and disc image and if I am not mistaken Mac's can usually read these but cannot write to them without third party software.

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Right you are. There is a Terminal command that can enable write support for NTFS but results with it have been mixed. So far my favorite third-party program for this is Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X software but there are some free alternatives as well.

Slydude said:

Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X software but there are some free alternatives as well.

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thanks guys for your help so with this software or Freeware. I can potentially backup my personal stuff, pictures, music ect to one of the drives?

Re the time machine drive "the buffalo link station". This is accessible online, My hope was to store files like photo's on here so we can access them anywhere to show friends/family ect I gather this wont be possible if Im using it as the time machine?
Bit of miss selling there buy my shop assistant i think.

In the short term, the reason for all this, is because my Mac has been recalled by apple due to a possible HD problem. if I have the time machine working and saved. I can take my Mac to apple and get it fixed and restore it via the time machine. then look further into arranging my data storage in a more convenient fashion later. Yes?

Cheers Trevor