External HDs Mac to pc?

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Tonight I was about ready to go buy a Western Digital MyBook Studio external harddrive. They're the ones made specifically for macs.

I know you can get ones that aren't specifically for macs for a lot cheaper. But I really like the idea that it automatically syncs whenever you save anything. I mean, what's the point of spending money on an external harddrive if I have to manually sync it? Then if I'm in the middle of an important project, and don't have time to sync it if I'm in a hurry or something (or if I forget) then all that important information that I had just added could be lost.

Here's what I thought about tonight that made me not get the HD yet-
If anything were to happen to my mac and it didn't get fixed right away, I would need to get my files onto my mom's PC. Would there be any way for me to get those files from that hard drive onto a PC if my hard drive was mac-specific?

Or if I got an external hard drive that works with macs and PCs, then would it still not be easy to transfer my info onto a PC since it'd be formatted for mac?

If worst came to worst I could always hook the hard drive up to a friend's computer and just burn CDs of the most important stuff. That'd just be kinda annoying...

I just wanted to see what kind of hard drive I'd need to get my files onto a PC, because if anything really bad ever happened to my mac, the other computer at my house is a PC...
 
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If you want the files from your mac to be read/write by a PC, the partition needs to be FAT32 or NTFS - although the latter can only be read by a mac (without a MacFuse driver).

Alternatively, a program like MacDrive on a PC can read/write files on an HFS (Mac) partition.

I use all of the above options.
 

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