Both Windows and Mac Operating Systems will read and write data to the drive, even if you are not using your computer. If you want to leave your computer on and disconnect the drive, you will need to safely remove ('eject' on Mac) the drive before you unplug it. Worst case scenario, I can find someone with a Mac and we can move files from the Iomega drive to the Mac, then to the 40GB drive that *does* work with both types of OS, and do that several times until everything is safely moved to the new computer, then I can do what I need to with the Iomega so it's useable with the PC.
I've recently gone through two different external hard drives: first a seagate goflex pro 750 Gb for Mac and now a Iomega 3.0 1Tb NTFS Formatted. I need to be able to use interchangeably between the Mac OSX and a Windows XP Pro.
Re-Formatting the Iomega on Mac as HFS+ and then plugging into the PC worked great as the Seagate drive already required me to download their HFS Driver for Windows. I suggest that route. Locate the Seagate Driver and install. Reads HFS+, allows read and write on both systems, no limit on transfer sizes. Adobe reader for mac os sierra free download. Just transfered 25.5 Gb in 12minutes.
Wasn't keeping too close of an eye on it. Well, I'm no tech-head (I probably just made-up that word), but I happened to notice that no one responded to you.
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The way I understand it is that the method you used to back-up your files is called 'writing'. Most people here said that it's possible to write to the various OS's using different techniques.
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That is not quite the same as 'backing-up', which in my experience, means that the computer uses some kind of software to periodically back-up and supplement your files to the EHD. I think it usually also means that a catalogue with libraries of sorts is saved, not merely copies of the files that are the same as what you have on your computer. My experience has also been that restoring these back-ups (sometimes called tapes) is a big pain and doesn't always work. I have been cleaning up an old WD HD and it had 3 such back-ups, one made by the sw I got with the drive (Retrospect Express 6.5), one from Ghost and one that was merely zipped files. The catalogue has been separated from the Retrospect BU and I spent 6 hours on-line trying to find how to get those restored (to no avail), the Ghost one wants to completely overwrite whatever drive I use to restore it, and the only one that worked perfectly was the one that was zipped. I do not even remember how I did that one or where it came from.
In the meantime, these 'handy' complete back-ups that I've saved all these years have proven almost useless. If anyone has anything to add or correct, feel free. How to create email mail merge in word. If anyone knows how I can reclaim the data on my Retrospect back-up set, I'd be thrilled to hear it! Hi I want give you my 25 cents, I found that OSX Snow Leopard can write on NTFS drive but is disable by default, I don't have experience using the NTFS third party software with Time Machine, but if you said that this not recognized by time machine, the alternative will be enable the OSX NTFS writing. Because this implies terminal commands, there is a program that can do by GUI interface, NTFS Mounter simply uses this ability, and provides a simple user interface to the mount command for NTFS volumes.
User interface is very similar to AirPort: simply click on the icon to display a menu with NTFS volumes name and select the volume you want to write on. You can download the program from. Well.A lot of these people did not fully read your question. You said that you wanted to to use an external drive to use for BACKUP.
I am in the same predicament as you. Yes, Mac and Windows can both read and write to both NTFS and FAT32 but for the mac you need third party software to do that. Windows can only backup on NTFS drives, while mac can only backup on FAT32 drives. For the Mac side, yes, you can download third party software so that it can read and write to NTFS drives but most likely you are using backup software such as Time Machine to do this. The problem is is that your backup software cannot use the NTFS read/write software to do the backup. It just doesn't work that way.