use same external hard drive time machine 2 macs

For example, you have a HFS drive and you intend to back up Windows data to the drive, you can download a tool which supports you to read the HFS drive in Windows. If you are unwilling to reformat the hard drive with FAT32 or exFAT and simply want to keep it in NTFS or HFS, you still can back up the different system data to the drive with the help of third party tool. Use Third Party Tool to Read/Write Data on Different OS Hence, if your computer is running in older systems, maybe exFAT is not an alternative way for you. Nevertheless, due to the fact that exFAT is a new file system, it’s incompatible with older Mac and Windows. That is to say, the file and partition size limitation doesn’t belong to the file system exFAT. Besides, it’s immune from the restrictions of FAT32. Format Drive with exFATĪside from FAT32, exFAT is the other file system, in which hard drive can be read and written in both Mac and Windows. To be specific, if you format a hard drive with FAT32 in Windows, the drive partition cannot be larger than 32GB. It also has limitation in partition size. For instance, it cannot support you to store files larger than 4GB. However, FAT32 is admittedly a too old file system, so it contains some technical flaws. Therefore, it is a good idea to format the external backup drive with FAT32.

One is FAT32, natively supported by all versions of Mac OS and Windows. To be honest, fortunately, there are indeed such ones. When it comes to backing up both Mac and Windows computer data to a single external drive, you will surely wonder if there is a file system which is supported by the both operating systems. We will tell you the exact answer and ways. For instance, you get a new external hard drive and would like to back up both Mac and Windows systems to it. Hence, many users are plagued by the drive compatibility issue in Mac and Windows. Yet, Windows is totally incapable of no matter reading or writing data on HFS drive. Mac is able to read the NTFS drive data, but unable to write to it. This post will look at this question to expose the answer.Īs we all know, the native file system in Mac OS is Hierarchical File System (HFS), and in Windows, it is NTFS. Therefore, many users wonder whether it’s possible to back up both Mac and Windows systems to the same hard drive. It is well-known that Mac and Windows uses different file system format.

Use same external hard drive time machine 2 macs