I swear I posted this but it's not showing up. New Mac user... I opened an excel fil

[gotwicks]

I have a WD MyBook External drive that is compatible with MAC. I can read the files just fine...however it won't let me save back to the external since it apparently needs to be reformatted.

My "PC" brain tells me..."no problem...copy the files...paste into a new folder on the MAC" but when I did that...all the files show 0bytes of info...and I even tried to open a file from the saved directory ..ya...no go there either.

I would love to do this and have the time machine reformat or do whatever it does to my external to make everything right and fully get the benefit of the time machine. Please assist this newbie

 

[cwa107]

Welcome to Mac-Forums, gotwicks.

Your WD is likely formatted NTFS. The Mac, by default has only "read" access to NTFS volumes. If you want to be able to write files, you'll need a third-party filesystem driver or reformat the drive to HFS+ (the Mac's own filesystem).

As far as copying the files, you're on the right track... you can either select all (Command + A) click and drag or right-click, copy and then paste to the appropriate destination. I'm not sure why it's showing 0 bytes - perhaps you checked before the copy operation completed? Not sure.

Once you've got it backed up, head over to Disk Utility (Applications => Utilities) to format the drive as "Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)". Then, you can enable Time Machine on it.

And before someone else jumps in here, your computer is referred to as a "Mac", which is short for "Macintosh", it's not an acronym, so you needn't capitalize it.

 

[gotwicks]

Ok...noted... will not capitalize it...is that a pet peeve in the community...lol..I'll try my efforts again and see if I get different results...thanks so much for the speedy reply

 

[cwa107]

Ok...noted... will not capitalize it...is that a pet peeve in the community...lol..I'll try my efforts again and see if I get different results...thanks so much for the speedy reply

Yes, a lot of people get hung up on that for some reason.

 

[gotwicks]

ok so it looks like i made better progress just by putting everything in the documents folder...rather than a folder in the documents folder. When it started the process a little window came up with what seemed like a progress indicator..then it disappeared... I'm about 50/50 on what actually copied and the rest still say zero...but I can't find where that little window went....is there a place where i can see current processes going on? The external doesn't seem to be doing much...