Time Machine Backup Compatible with PC?
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laeti
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laeti -
laeti -
Hello,
My MacBook is showing signs of weakness, so I recently bought an external hard drive and I'm using the "Time Machine" function to perform backups. I thought about setting up the hard drive to work on both Mac and PC. My question is quite simple, but since I don't know much:
If I back up with "Time Machine", will I be able to recover my data on a PC? By that I mean, can I read the information on my external hard drive on a system other than Macs?
If my question isn't clear: if I want to be able to use the data I want to back up from my Mac on a PC, is it better to use Time Machine or not?
Thank you very much for your clarifications!
My MacBook is showing signs of weakness, so I recently bought an external hard drive and I'm using the "Time Machine" function to perform backups. I thought about setting up the hard drive to work on both Mac and PC. My question is quite simple, but since I don't know much:
If I back up with "Time Machine", will I be able to recover my data on a PC? By that I mean, can I read the information on my external hard drive on a system other than Macs?
If my question isn't clear: if I want to be able to use the data I want to back up from my Mac on a PC, is it better to use Time Machine or not?
Thank you very much for your clarifications!
2 réponses
Good evening,
There is a format that is perfectly compatible with both Mac OS and Windows without any file size limitations.
This is the ExFAT format. (usable from Windows XP SP3 and Mac OS 10.6.5)
However, this format will not be compatible with Time Machine, which requires the Mac OS extended format.
The solution would therefore be to have a high-capacity external hard drive and to partition this drive into 3,
- one partition in Mac OS for Time Machine
- one partition in NTFS for backups made under Windows using software X
- one partition in ExFat for exchanges between Mac and PC.
If the backup software X, used by Windows, accepts to make these backups on a support in ExFAT, the NTFS partition may not be necessary.
Have a nice evening.
PS: Hi Ritchi
Always indicate the exact model of your Mac and the version of Mac OS!
Francis Sanspseudo - iMac Intel Core2Duo-Mac OS 10.7 + iMac-G5 running Mac OS 10.5
There is a format that is perfectly compatible with both Mac OS and Windows without any file size limitations.
This is the ExFAT format. (usable from Windows XP SP3 and Mac OS 10.6.5)
However, this format will not be compatible with Time Machine, which requires the Mac OS extended format.
The solution would therefore be to have a high-capacity external hard drive and to partition this drive into 3,
- one partition in Mac OS for Time Machine
- one partition in NTFS for backups made under Windows using software X
- one partition in ExFat for exchanges between Mac and PC.
If the backup software X, used by Windows, accepts to make these backups on a support in ExFAT, the NTFS partition may not be necessary.
Have a nice evening.
PS: Hi Ritchi
Always indicate the exact model of your Mac and the version of Mac OS!
Francis Sanspseudo - iMac Intel Core2Duo-Mac OS 10.7 + iMac-G5 running Mac OS 10.5
laeti
Thank you very much for the response!
Hello,
Time Machine is an Apple application. It will only work on Apple devices. The backup format is not designed to be universal, and therefore a PC will not understand the Time Machine files, which are incremental backups.
You should not imagine that Time Machine simply copies a modified file and that you end up with N copies of the file. That would take up too much space.
If you want to back up PC and Mac data on the same hard drive, then you will face format issues. The only common format is FAT32, which is not widely used on the PC side anymore due to its many limitations (for example: a FAT32 file cannot exceed 4GB).
If you format your drive to NTFS to please your PC, then while the Mac can read it, it won't be able to write to it unless you have a more or less reliable utility to do so.
If you format your drive to HFS to please the Mac, then it’s the PC that will sulk because it doesn’t even know how to read it, let alone write to it.
Ritchi
Time Machine is an Apple application. It will only work on Apple devices. The backup format is not designed to be universal, and therefore a PC will not understand the Time Machine files, which are incremental backups.
You should not imagine that Time Machine simply copies a modified file and that you end up with N copies of the file. That would take up too much space.
If you want to back up PC and Mac data on the same hard drive, then you will face format issues. The only common format is FAT32, which is not widely used on the PC side anymore due to its many limitations (for example: a FAT32 file cannot exceed 4GB).
If you format your drive to NTFS to please your PC, then while the Mac can read it, it won't be able to write to it unless you have a more or less reliable utility to do so.
If you format your drive to HFS to please the Mac, then it’s the PC that will sulk because it doesn’t even know how to read it, let alone write to it.
Ritchi