Mac / PC / External Drive Backups

Mac / PC / External Drive Backups

I know this topic has been covered, however as is typical of the all mighty Internet there appears to be conflicting information so I thought I would try once more.

What I am working with:
PC with windows XP
Mac Air 2012
Seagate Free Agent External Hard Drive (NTFS format – 1TB)

What I want to do:
Have my PC regularly backup to the Seagate on the same partition as the MAC.
Have my Mac Air reg regularly backup to the Seagate on the same partition as the PC.
Have my Mac & Seagate backup to a remote cloud service.

Concerns:
I have read that some Mac’s cannot read a NTFS formatted hard drive. I have no issue with that, my Mac accesses it just fine.

I have read that having a Mac regularly access a NTFS formatted hard drive can eventually corrupt the NTFS hard drive. Is there truth to this, has anyone experienced it?

My current status:
Using the software that came with my free agent I have no issues having my PC backing up to the Seagate, it works perfectly.

Unless I do it manually (meaning drag and drop), I cannot get my Mac to automatically backup to the Seagate. I searched for free agent software for the Mac however I had no luck. I tried to use Time Machine on the Mac however it wants to reformat the Seagate hard drive to a HFS+ Journaled Format.

I read that once I format the Seagate to the HFS+ Journaled Format that my PC will not be able to access the drive. Is this true?

Does anyone have any suggestions or has anyone accomplished what I am trying to do? If so can you suggest software for the Mac and software for the PC that will run scheduled backups. Also does anyone have any suggestions on a reasonably priced and secure cloud / offsite storage service for a regular backups of about 1 TB of data?

Thanks and let me know if you need any more information.

Lots of questions.

Your Mac and PC can not backup to the same partition. I'm not sure what you mean by same partition. Are you referring to the same drive? A drive can be partitioned into several "parts".

The only file system common to both Windows and Mac OS X is FAT-32 and Time Machine will only backup to a drive or partition formatted to HFS+. OS X can only read NTFS, not write to it. For that you need a special driver. Paragon NTFS, $19.95 from Paragon software is what we recommend. LINK

Windows can not read or write to Mac HFS+ without a special driver. MacDrive 9 from Mediafour is expensive but works very well. ($49.95)

For backup software that can be scheduled, you might be interested in Carbon Copy Cloner ($20) which will do regularly scheduled backups and also can create a bootable clone.

As far as backup software for Windows.... I'll let you do the searching for that as there are a myriad of programs that you can use. One of the best comes included with your copy of Windows 7 and that's Microsoft's own version of backup. I use it and it works well. There is also Acronis True Image Home version which I have used and it too works well.

My advice is to keep all your OS X and Windows backups separate. I know that means two hard drives but for safety it would be best.

You could also throw out that junk and buy a Time Capsule. Boom, done.

Chscag,

Thank you for the feedback. The reason I am trying to back up both systems to the same partition is I am looking into doing an online (carbonite or something of the sort) backup of my system and most services allow 1 PC and 1 external drive. My thought was if I partition my hard drive it will show as 2 separate drives and I wont be able to back both up online.

So per your advice of keeping my Mac and PC backups separate, how do feel about me sharing files between the two systems. For example say I was working on a word doc on my PC, save it, then transfer it to my Mac work on it, save, back and forth, etc. Will this data become corrupt? If not one possibility may be for me to use dropbox to keep my working data between the two in sync, have the Mac backup to a drive then clone it online.

Last question, I actually have 2 seagate 1 TB drives that I use as backups (one is a mirror image of the other). If I were to reformat one of the drives to the HFS, how can I get the data from my other drive (NTFS) to the newly formatted HFS drive? Right now my Mac will read / write to the HFS however I read that it will corrupt the data. What is the safest method to get the NTFS drive data to the HFS drive?

Thanks again

Please don't take what I am about to say as bashing Carbonite I'm not. Check with whatever provider you are interested in and see if what you want to do is possible. With Carbonite for example this feature seems available with the HomePlus and HomePremiere accounts. These accounts make no mention of Mac support at all. Nor does their feature of backing up an external drive. See questions 6, 7, and 8 on the How Does Online Backup Work? - Online Backup FAQs | Carbonite

BTW I think the closest I've seen to what you want to do is backup to a network device such as a Time Capsule or similar. Each machine had share space on the device and its backup was stored there/ If I remember correctly it was part of a Time Machine hint at macosxhints.com

As with what has been said by chscag run two separate drives one for each OS and he gave you links to software that allows read and write on both unless you are going to keep your files smaller than 4GB and in Fat32 while using workgroup.
You could also look at the list of problems when Time Machine does not have its own drive.
You could also use something like WD's Live Book which will work with all your files .
As for Carbonite better check your data cap with your ISP you could be racing your way to extra fees.

osxx said:

As for Carbonite better check your data cap with your ISP you could be racing your way to extra fees.

Click to expand...

Good point. Good thing it can do the backups in the background. The upload speed on many accounts makes that a slow process.