Apr 14, 2017 How to make external hard drive to work with Mac and Windows Pc Tech & Design. Make external harddrive compatible with mac and windows computer, How to format using disk utility on Mac.
Table of Contents. Before we Begin It is worth understanding that there are four main products in the Backup Plus range of external hard drives.
Here is a comparison table detailing what your options are for the file systems installed on the Seagate Backup Plus drive when you buy. Backup Plus File System Format Ultra Slim NTFS Slim NTFS or HFS+ Portable NTFS or HFS+ Backup Plus Fast 4TB NTFS You’ll observe from the table above that the Backup Plus external drives can be purchased with either NTFS or HFS+ file systems pre installed. The Backup Plus Ultra Slim and Fast 4TB are provided with NTFS file systems only. What is a file system format and why is it important?
It is the software layout of the external hard drive that allows the Mac to see, understand and read from and write to the drive. NTFS is the file system understood and written to by a Windows PC. Macs can see an file system, read the file system but cannot write to it.
HFS+, which is also known as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system, is the file system Macs use. It is important to know which file system you have preinstalled as this has a bearing on how you go about using the external drive on your Mac.
All the Backup Plus external drives support USB 3.0 connections and read and write speeds (up to 5 Gbits/s minus USB protocol overheads). Depending on which kind and type of drive you purchase they are available in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacity options. If you would like to read further details on the Seagate Backup Plus range of external drives Seagate Backup Plus Connection to your Mac Once you understand what you have, the next thing you’ll want to do is connect your Seagate Backup Plus to your Mac.
Let me tell you a bit about USB cables. Cables are known by types. The size and shape of the connection and the USB standard they support. The cable for the Backup Plus drives are USB 3.0 cables with a type A connection on the end that goes into the Mac and a type B Micro USB that goes into the Backup Plus drive. New Drive Icon On Desktop Note: Your drive may not say Untitled, what is written under the drive would depend on which drive was purchased.
Read on and look at the options you have for using the Seagate Backup Plus on Mac. How to Use Seagate Backup Plus Slim for Mac Remember earlier I talked about file systems formats? Here is where that information is now important. Let’s have a look at a scenario where you have purchased the ‘for Mac’ version of the Backup Plus Slim or indeed Portable and the drive has a HFS+ file system on it. HFS+ is also known as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system and that is how you will see it referred to on the Mac. I will cover NTFS formatted drives in the next section of this article. Assuming you’re happy to have the whole drive available to use to drag and drop files to or to use the whole drive for Time Machine backups on your Mac you are good to go.
Your Mac understands HFS+ directly and you can use your drive directly. Jump down to my section on Drag and Drop or the section on setting up Time Machine to use your drive. Should you want to both things, i.e. Have a part of the drive where you can copy files to and assuming the Backup Plus drive is large enough to do your Time Machine backups, then you will need to format and partition the Seagate Backup Plus. Don’t worry it is easy to do and you should have it cracked in well under 15 minutes. Skip down to later in this article and take a look at the section Format and Partition Seagate Backup Plus on Mac How to Use Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim on a Mac And for that matter any of the Backup Plus drives that are purchased as NTFS formatted, whether that is the Slim, Portable or Fast 4TB. Mac OS will see the drive is connected but the drive will not be writable on a Mac without a little effort.
There are several ways to go about being able to see and write to the Backup Plus drive. It is worth having a think about how you plan to use the Seagate Backup Plus external drives on a Mac before you decide. Here is a selection of options for a NTFS formatted Backup Plus.
Download the Paragon driver either using the Seagate Dashboard software that is installed on the drive (instructions in the Seagate Dashboard section below) or, install it on your Mac and the Mac will be able to read and write from the drive. The plus points for doing this are –. once the driver is downloaded there is nothing more to do in terms of setup You can head to the drag and drop part of this article and copy files to and from the drive or read files on the drive. This is a good solution if you mostly use the Seagate Backup Plus drive on a Windows PC and need to access files from your Mac occasionally. The minus points for doing this are –.
you need the installed driver to write files to and from your Mac. Start Here Mac The software allows you to register your Seagate Backup Plus drive for warranty purposes, once registered the next screen asks if you want to download the Paragon driver for Mac OS. If it is a NTFS drive and you want to install the NTFS driver go ahead. Otherwise you can click ‘next’ to click past this option if you do not want to download the driver. You can also download the toolkit for Mac OS. A pdf document with the Warranty information is also on the drive. Take a look at this AskSeagate YouTube video to see how the software works and what the screens look like ahead of time.
YouTube Video: ToolKit for MacOS – First Time Setup Video Credit – AskSeagate If you are planning on formatting and partitioning your Seagate Backup Plus drive and want to use this software in the future copy it off onto your Mac so that you can copy it back on again later. Format and Partition Seagate Backup Plus on Mac Once you have decided how you would like to set up your NTFS drive or for that matter your HFS+ drive head on over to my article ‘‘. Jump down to the format section where you’ll find instructions, images and a video on formatting an external hard drive. Then if you want to go ahead and partition up your Seagate Backup Plus drive on your Mac, head to my article ‘‘ again you’ll find instructions, images and a video on partitioning up a hard drive. The document is valid and the procedure for creating partitions is the same to create partitions whether you plan only ever to use the Backup Plus on a Mac.
You can Also Watch this YouTube Video. The video is 13 minutes long and Acguevara shows how to format and partition a Seagate Backup Plus on Mac OS Sierra Seagate – Backup Plus Slim – how to set up/ How to Use – Guide for Mac Video Credit: Acguevara Once you have the Backup Plus set up how you want, then you can head back here. How to use Seagate backup Plus on Mac Drag and Drop Assuming you have a ‘for Mac’ Backup Plus Drive. formatted as HFS+ or. have already formatted an NTFS drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or. have a partition formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or. have a drive or partition formatted as ExFAT or.
using the Paragon NTFS driver you can freely copy and paste or drag and drop from your Backup Plus external hard drive. And it is simple and easy as using your Macs internal drives. It useful to give your Backup Plus drive or partition on your Backup Plus drive a name that helps you quickly identify it on the desktop. Create Selection Window Click in an empty spot in the finder window and while holding your cursor drag a window across all the files you want to select. Once the files you want are selected. Go to the top of the finder window on your Mac and click edit then select copy then go to the finder window on the Seagate Backup Plus and click on that window then select Edit then paste and the files are copied across.
And it is as easy as that. Understand that if the files on the Backup Plus are the only copies of the files you have and you lose your Backup Plus drive then those files will be lost. Have a copy of them somewhere else, either on another external drive or on your internal drive. When you are finished using the Backup Plus drive Eject the drive from your Mac by right clicking on the disk icon on your desktop and selecting Eject. Right Click to Eject External Drive And if you have deleted files from the Backup Plus empty your trash before ejecting the drive so that the deleted files are cleared properly from the external hard drive before it is ejected. How to connect your Seagate Backup Plus to Time Machine?
Using your Seagate Backup Plus – either the whole drive or a large enough partition on the Seagate Backup plus as a place to store a copy of everything you have on your Mac is a great way to use the external hard drive. Large enough Partition? Yes, if you have 600GB of files to backup, you should ideally have 1.2TB of space to backup to for Time Machine to work correctly. What does Time Machine backup? Time Machine backs up everything. Your Macs operating system, your files, your applications, photo’s, music.
If you have used iTunes to backup your iPhone and iPad to your Mac then when you do a Time Machine backup those backups will be backed up as well. Unlike the PC software supplied with the Seagate Backup Plus Time Machine allows you to completely recreate your Mac should the worst happen. And it is incremental forever. What does that mean?
The first backup is a full backup and after that only the changes to your Mac are backed up. It makes the subsequent backups quicker to do and Time Machine understands how to use the incremental backup along with the original full backup to recreate everything on your Mac.
Have your Seagate Backup Plus connected and formatted correctly. Either as the default HFS+ or you have formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. Then you are ready to fire up Time Machine. Time Machine can be found via a spotlight search. Time Machine Backup Now Time Machine will start preparing your backup. If this is your first backup this could take a while, particularly if you have a lot of files to backup. Make sure your Mac is connected to power and leave it to prepare the backup and then do the actual backup.
If you are the impatient type you can also click on the symbol while the backup is taking place to check the progress of your backup. And to check when your backup is finished. The icon on the desktop representing your disk will change to green once the backup is completed. Eject the drive from the Mac when you are done and ready to store your Seagate Backup Plus.
Bottom Left hand corner is check box to Encrypt Backups Its at the bottom left corner of that screen. These kinds of software features on a Mac is by design secure.
Even the FBI has problems accessing Mac data that has been secured. If you lose your password you will have a sad face for a very long time. Frequently Asked Questions 1. Seagate Backup Plus not Recognized You may plug your Seagate Backup Plus into your Mac and you see no icon on the desktop what to do?.
unplug the USB cable and try again – you may just have got a bad connection. If there was some other device plugged into that port and it wasn’t ejected properly sometimes the port software can get hung up. Try another USB port if you have one. A reboot of your Mac will reset the USB software at the port and can clear problems.
Are you sure you don’t have a broken USB cable? Try another cable. Check if you can see the drive in Disk Utility sometimes an NTFS formatted drive doesn’t appear correctly on the desktop but can be seen in Disk Utility. Select the drive from there. Can you see the drive appear under devices in a finder window? Make sure your finder preferences has the external disks check box checked. try the drive on another Mac or Windows PC, you may be unlucky and have a corrupted drive.
The USB cable provided with the Seagate Backup Plus is too short? Yes, it is only 18 inches long and depending on where you want to place the drive compared to your laptop you may want a longer USB 3.0 cable. Check out my Last Words You have made it! And now you should know how to use Seagate Backup Plus on Mac – have your drive connected, formatted and partitioned if you choose to.
Well done, feel free to Want to take a look at the Seagate backup Plus range of drives and their features. I have a document here on the site.
Some backup hard drives are marketed as “made for Mac,” such as WD’s Passport for Mac, as they work seamlessly with Apple’s Time Machine. Many users don’t know, however, that they can easily be reformatted for PC or cross-OS use.
The reasoning for doing this is because these disks can often be found cheaper than their regular counterparts. In this guide we will show you how you can format and use a “Made for Mac” hard disk on a Windows PC. Compatible Disks As stated, the most commonly-used disk is the, but there are others. Devices such as Apple’s Airport Time Capsule will not work for this tutorial as the disk has to be a plug-in hard disk drive or solid state drive. I’ll be using a small, 20GB internal HDD for this tutorial; However, these steps will work with any disk. Formatting the Disk This should go without saying, but formatting will remove any and all data on a disk! Make a backup of any data you want to keep before formatting.
Now that you’re past that, plug your disk into your windows PC and open up disk management. To do this, type diskmgmt.msc into the search bar of the Start menu. Click on the only result. You should now be presented with a window that looks a little something like the following image.
From here, find your disk and delete any pre-existing partitions by right-clicking and deleting the volume. If a volume exists, it will have an overhead blue bar to signal that it is a “Primary Partition.” If it’s unallocated, it will have an overhead black bar.
Now that that’s done, right click again, but this time select “New Simple Volume.” You’ll be presented with the New Simple Volume Wizard welcome screen. Click “Next” to continue. Here we’ll specify the volume size. In almost all cases, we’ll want to keep the maximum allotted size – unless you wanted to add another partition. If for any reason the simple volume size in MB does not equal the maximum disk space, you’ll want to correct it. When the space is specified, click “Next.” Select “format this volume with the following settings.” Change the selected “file system” to “FAT32.” Verify that the “allocation unit size” is set to “default.” Finally, change the “volume label” to whatever you’d like. Check “perform a quick format” and select “Next.” Be sure everything on the completion screen is to your specifications and select “Finish.” After you’ve read this final warning, click “OK.”.