external hard drive question

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my girlfriend has a macbook pro for school but over the summer has taken soooooo many pictures and needs more space on her laptop. i have a windows PC and have a lot of music and movies and such that i want to put on an external and use from that external.

my question is... if i have the external HD hooked up for my pc can i put her pictures from her macbook on that external without any problems?

i havent got the external HD yet but im thinking im going to get a TB. does it have to be a PC/mac compatible? or can i just get any kind?

i think her iphoto library is like 13GB so im guessing a fat32 format wont work...

anyone have answers to my qustions?
thanks in advance

Jordan
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.8 GHz 15" MacBook Pro OS X 10.7.x & some old Macs
Read this information on FAT32: Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP

You can use FAT32 if each individual file is under 4GB per file. The other option is if your girlfriend's Mac is using Snow Leopard OS 10.6 it can read NTFS Windows file format as default but it needs a special software to turn on the writing ability.

There are a few software out there but I haven't personally used them myself so I can't recommend any. Hopefully someone will come on by and recommend one or you can do a search on this forum because it's been mentioned a few times.

So your options are either to use FAT32 which needs no special software to work in both Mac and Windows but it does have some limitations or you can format the hard drive to NTFS and get Snow Leopard to write to it. PC/Mac compatibility just depends on how you format the drive so that it works in either Mac or Windows. This means that any hard drive will work for either system as long as your format it correctly.

Welcome to the forum by the way. ;)
 
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i think she has OS 10.4 so fat32 is my best bet. im kind of noob to mac. i have a crappy mac desktop that cant even play youtube videos because it doesnt have an intel chip. so i didnt mess around with it much.

so... she should have all her pictures stored individually somewhere then right? she knows less about her laptop then i do, she just says she puts her photos in iphoto and there is just the library.
if they are individuals i should just be able to put them on the same external with no problem? just format it to fat32 in windows, usb it to her laptop, make a new folder and transfer? is it that easy? lol
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.8 GHz 15" MacBook Pro OS X 10.7.x & some old Macs
I don't really use iPhoto so I'm not a good person to ask. You might want to start a new post in the applications section about it if you get no answers because the iPhoto problem is a separate issue. I believe there is an export images feature in iPhoto. If she doesn't use that feature then I don't believe all the editing she has done to her images will be saved.

You are right that if her files were just sitting in a folder then you could just copy and paste the files over to the external hard drive. It's very similar to Windows. If she needs anything else to backup then you can practice by copying & pasting or dragging & dropping the files to the external. I believe iPhoto just needs to be handled differently. Since I don't use iPhoto I just copy all my images over to my external.
 

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