I've just got an iomega 500gig external. We're a two OS family - one XP, one OSX and I was wanting to setup to backup both to the drive.

If I have the drive with a single partition FAT 32 formatted I can read write off both machines but the XP backup wont do backup files > 4 gig and both OS's have problems detecting the drive.

If I have the drive with a single partition NTFS formatted OSX will read but not write.

I cant see with XP (media centre) how to change the file permissions on the drive. Does anyone know anything about external drives and NTFS with OSX?

Otherwise - I was thinking about putting three partiitions in it - doing one OSX, one NTFS and a common with Fat32 but its all lot of stuffing around if there are other easier solutions. Anyone been through something similar and have any advice ?

Thanks

Hi,

NTFS is a relatively closed standard, and is not able to be written to by MacOSX.

There may be an NTFS-Write driver For OSX but i am not aware of it, your only real option is either Fat32 or an HFS+ driver for windows AFAIK, however i hope someone can prove me wrong.

Released today...

http://shadowofged.blogspot.com/2007...-mac-os-x.html

might be worth a look, but you need some technical skillz on the mac side by the looks...

or take a gander at Macdrive

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

Cheers

YOU ROCK!!!

Very experimental, and certainly has some slowness associated, which is known and will be improved in future versions.

Certainly is nice to have write ability on NTFS filesystems in OSX, for those that must have. And can put up with slower then usual performance when doing such writes.

I wouldn't trust drivers for NTFS - better is to network the computers and backup that way. That's what I do at home.

My external LaCie drive is Mac formatted and I use MacDrive to write to it from my wife's PC. Works a treat.

for Macdrive - great app. Haven't had any problems with it in the past

thanks for all that - just looking at MacDrive now.

Currawong - are you talking about backing up between machines or sharing off the external drive as a network resource ?

Major vote for MacDrive from me, too ... been using it since it came out, stable, lets all versions of Winderz read and write any Mac format (including HFS Extended Journaled Case Sensitive) to any type of media. Well worth the investment.

NTFS should be avoided at all costs, no matter what OS you use. Whilst HFS and NTFS are both proprietry filing systems, Apple have made their specs available openly. Microsoft won't give anyone the spec behind NTFS, so everything that can do NTFS and is not a Microsoft product has been reverse-engineered, and I trust that about as far as I can spit the Titanic. NTFS also has many more security holes in it -- whomever came up with the concept of ADS (Alternate Data Streams) should be shot.


Brains

have been playing around. Formatted the whole drive HFS+ and installed macdrive on the XP machine. Ran a backup with SuperDuper off the Mac - no problem there - except its the freebie of SuperDuper so it wants to do a complete erase and backup and cant do incrementals.... so either need to buy the full version or create a 100gig partition for the mac backup.

MacDrive though isnt configuring the drive under XP for some reason. The drive is showing - if I go to Partition in MacDrive it shows the external ok, but when I try to browse with windows explorer its not showing it for some reason. The help files on MacDrive arent that useful.

Sooooo - maybe back to the idea of creating three partitions on the drive each with different formats... !

Create 2 partitions. One FAT32, one NTFS. Back up your XP box to the NTFS partition, back up your OSX box to the FAT32 partition.

There's no ideal solution (unless you splurge on another drive and have one OSX and one NTFS).

Like Brains said, NTFS is garbage anyway. Sure, variable block size, >4gb etc, but fundamentally it's rubbish.

There ain't a way to make OSX write to NTFS (I've investigated this myself in the past), and if there is a way you should steer the hell clear of it anyway.

yea - I'm back to thinking I'll do three partitions - HFS+ FAT32 for common stuff and a NTFS. Too much stuffing around otherwise - its a 500gig drive so there's enough space to do it.