I am looking at the My Book 8 TB External Drive. Can you backup both a PC and Mac OS on the same drive or only one of the operating systems are compatible at one time?
Hi @jcanadayd,
For a hard drive to be able to be read from and written to on both a Windows and macOS computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format.
Please refer to the article How to Format a Drive for Use on Windows and macOS (exFat or FAT32):
Well, most external hard drives are designed to work for Windows computers. Windows was mainly optimized for NTFS (New Technology file system) format, on the other hand, APFS was created for the Mac OS. NTFS is not compatible with Mac and similarly, APFS does not get along with Windows.
If you wish to make your drive compatible with both Windows & Mac system then you may need to format the drive in any of the below formats:
• MS-DOS (FAT)
• ExFAT
Further, I suggest you to check the below link that explains all the methods to format your external drive for mac without any data loss:
Hope it helps!
Yes, you can back up files from both a Windows PC and a Mac computer on the same Western Digital My Book 8 TB External Drive, but you need to make some preparations first. The following partitioning method will help you achieve this.
You can split the 8 TB drive into two distinct sections (partitions): one for the PC and another for your Mac. [Related blog - Guide on How to Partition A Hard Drive on Mac ]
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Plug the hard drive into your Mac, open Disk Utility, and split the drive into two segments (e.g., 4 TB for Windows and 4 TB for Mac).
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Format the Mac partition as APFS or Mac OS Extended, which allows you to use Apple’s automated Time Machine backup tool.
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Format the other partition as exFAT to work seamlessly with Windows Backup.
The Catch: Apple’s Time Machine requires an external hard drive formatted in a Mac file system (like APFS or Mac OS Extended). You cannot run a Time Machine backup directly onto an exFAT-formatted partition without macOS reformatting it.
