External Hard Drive - What should i format it as?

I have a 1TB external hard drive that was originally formatted NTFS.
When i started using it on my MBP, i purchased "Paragon NTFS for Mac" so i can read/write to the drive.

I just got an iMac which replaced my old tired PC, so I'm pretty much all Mac's.

I thought about dumping the content of the drive on to another drive and formatting the 1TB drive to a Mac OS format. (then dumping the content back)
But I'm not sure if there's really any advantages for me doing this?

Should i keep it NTFS, in case i ever have to hook it up to a PC.
Or should i just convert it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Opinions, comments and advice is appreciated. Thanks

I would reformat it to Mac OS format.

If you need to access the information from a PC you can always share it over the network

I keep all my externals as NTFS, just so that if I do ever need to take it so a friends place with a PC then they can still access the files and I can still write them with Paragon. Id just leave it the way it is.

Don't really see any point of changing the format except:

Do you have a backup for your Macs separate from this drive?

I don't mean just a drag and drop the data you want backed up, I'm talking about a real backup, either SuperDuper! or Time Machine. For these, you will need at least an HFS+ formatted partition if not the whole drive.

From my own experience, a SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner backup is the essential first line backup. You'll have a bootable backup that allows you to boot your Mac to 1) just keep on going when your internal drive fails until you have time to replace it and 2) troubleshoot the internal when you have any sort of glitch in updates or software changes made that may prevent you from booting the internal.

My SD! backup has saved me only once in 3 yrs now, but am sure glad I had it. Took less than an 30 minutes for me to find and fix an issue of booting up to a kernel panic instead of the desktop that quite possibly would have required a complete reinstall without it.

Since i do occasionally travel with this particular drive, i think i will keep it NTFS. There have been several times i had to connect it to a PC to transfer data to/from a co-worker/friends computer.


I have a backup drive just for my MBP, since it's internal drive is only 160GB.

But i just got the iMac 3 days ago and have not figured out what i want to do for this one. I think i will pickup another 1TB drive just as a backup/clone for the iMac.

I've been using Time machine for the MBP, is that my best option?

Time Machine is a fine option.

You wont get a bootable drive, but it will restore your whole system (like me) in a case of disk failure and after a fresh install of OSX you can just bring evrything else back from your Time Machine back-up

That works.

Now what i would really like to do is, get a Drobo and have both the MBP and iMacs back-up on it and also use it as a mass storage device.
That would be so much better then having like 3-4 different drives.

550.00 for the Drobo & Share + the cost of a few TB drives. IDK if i want to do that right now, or if i can. LOL

I have another questions.

I have an External HD connected to the iMac.
How can i share that drive on my network, so my MBP can see/use it?

TomTomTuning said:

I have another questions.

I have an External HD connected to the iMac.
How can i share that drive on my network, so my MBP can see/use it?

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Bump?!?!