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If you have an external hard drive or USB flash drive that you’d like to use on both Macs and Windows PCs, choosing the right file system to format the drive can be confusing. Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly.
Need to access or transfer files between Mac and PC? Dayz for mac. As simple as this task sounds, it’s not very straightforward for inexperienced users. Since Mac OS X and Windows use totally different file systems, the way a drive is formatted can determine what type of computer it will work with. In fact, there are four ways you can format an external or USB flash drive to achieve varying degrees of compatibility between Macs and PCs. Let’s take a look at them:
Sep 30, 2019 How to Format your Seagate Backup Plus for Mac; 1. Turn on your Mac. Log yourself in. Look for the Backup Plus external hard drive icon on your desktop. Open Disk Utility. The left side of the Disk Utility window shows you all the drives you have connected to your Mac. Then take a look at the top of the Disk Utility window and click on Erase. Never worry about do not know how to recover files from Seagate External hard drive on Mac. You can learn the detailed guide for Seagate file recovery on Mac. Whether you are deleted or formatted driver, you can use this Seagate external hard drive recovery Mac software to retrieve them. Seagate Backup Plus comes in a couple varieties — one pre-formatted for Mac, the other pre-formatted for Windows but also readable on Mac. But sometimes a little help is needed, if you decide to start using your Windows drive mainly on your new Mac. Oct 08, 2019 A Seagate ExFAT formatted hard drive is more of a half way house on your Mac compared to an NTFS formatted drive. An example of a Seagate drive in ExFAT format is the Seagate Backup Plus Slim. And the Seagate solid state drives are ExFAT formatted. When you plug in your Seagate drive with an ExFAT file system on it.
HFS+
Mac OS X’s native file system is HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended), and it’s the only one that works with Time Machine. But while HFS+ is the best way to format drives for use on Macs, Windows does not support it. Game maker for mac. If you’re only going to be using your external or USB flash drive with certain PCs – such as at home or the office – you might be interested in a program called MacDrive. When you install MacDrive on a Windows PC, it will be able to seamlessly read & write to HFS+ drives. This isn’t a good solution if you need your drive to work on any PC without installing software, though.
NTFS
The native Windows file system is NTFS, which is only partially compatible with Mac OS X. Macs can read files on NTFS drives, but it cannot write to them. So if you need to get files from a PC to your Mac, NTFS is a decent option. However, you won’t be able to move files in the other direction, from Mac to PC.
FAT32
The most universally supported way to format your drive is with the FAT32 file system. It works with all versions of Mac OS X and Windows. Case closed, right? Well, not so fast. Unfortunately, FAT32 is a very old file system and has some technical limitations. For example, you cannot save files that are larger than 4GB on a FAT32-formatted drive. This is a deal-breaker if you work with huge files. The other limitation is the total size of the partition. If you format your FAT32 drive in Windows, the drive partition cannot be larger than 32GB. If you format it from a Mac running 10.7 Lion, the drive partition can be up to 2TB. Much better, except for that pesky 4GB limit.
exFAT
The exFAT file system eliminates the two major deficiencies of FAT32: the largest partition and file sizes it supports are virtually unlimited by today’s standards. Awesome, it’s perfect! Almost… since exFAT is fairly new, it isn’t compatible with older Macs and PCs. Any Mac running 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) or 10.7 (Lion) supports exFAT, while PCs running Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows 7 are compatible. If you know you’ll be using computers running updated versions of these operating systems, exFAT is the clear best choice.
Format a drive using Disk Utility on a Mac
- Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities).
- Select your external hard drive or USB flash drive from the list on the left.
- Click on the Erase tab. Select the format – Mac OS Extended (HFS+), MS-DOS (FAT32), or exFAT – then name the drive.
- Click the Erase button and the drive will start formatting. Be aware that formatting a drive deletes all of the files on it, so back up anything important before completing this step.
Format a drive using Windows
- Go to Computer (or My Computer in Windows XP).
- Select your drive from the list and right-click on it. Choose Format from the contextual menu.
- A window will pop up where you can choose the format – NTFS, FAT32, or exFAT. Make sure the allocation unit size is set to default and type in a volume label.
- Click Start to format the drive.
Seagate is one of the most famous brands for the external hard drive. Its big storage is used for users to save multiple important documents, videos, photos, and other types of files. However, it still happens that all data just have gone or you deleted files accidentally and want to do Seagate file recovery on Mac. Actually, you can. Let me explain recover Seagate external hard drive on Mac in details.
First and for the most, you need to know that all data saved on the Seagate external hard drive is still there. If you delete some files from it, these files are still there as well, but invisible. The theory is: the storage is fixed, and if you delete some files, they’re still there and invisible, waiting to be replaced by new data. In this case, if new data is not created after you losing files from the Seagate external hard drive, then there is a chance for you to recover them. In summary, before you learn how do you recover files from Seagate external hard drive on Mac, stop using the external hard drive right away.
As I have mentioned all the lost or deleted files in Seagate external hard drive are invisible. To Seagate file recovery on Mac, you need the help of iBeesoft Data Recovery for Mac, a professional data recovery software tool specially designed to recover files from external hard drive, Mac laptop/desktop, USB flash drive, SD card and more. Here are some of its main features:
Your Safe & Effective Seagate File Recovery Mac Software
- Restore more than 1000 file types, including videos, photos, images, documents and more from Seagate external hard drive on Mac.
- Quick Scan mode scans for files quickly and Deep Scan mode is sector-by-sector analyzed to ensure a higher Seagate file recovery Mac rate.
- Supports Recover Seagate external hard drive on Mac, including file lost due to deleted, Seagate external hard drive formatted, not accessible, etc.
- Fully compatible with macOS to recover deleted/lost files from Mac, Seagate external hard drives, etc.
Actually, no matter for what reason you want to recover data from Seagate external hard drive on Mac, like virus attack, Seagate external hard drive damaged, purposely deletion or unintentional deletion, inaccessible, formatted, diskpart, and more, if you can connect the Seagate external hard drive with your Mac and your Mac can detect it as an external hard drive, you can follow the guide below to learn the details for how to recover deleted files from Seagate external hard drive on Mac or how to Seagate external hard drive data recovery on Mac.
Steps to Seagate External Hard Drive File Recovery on Mac
Click the download button to get the Mac version of Seagate data recovery software. It’s fully compatible with all the macOS, including the latest Mojave. Since this kind of tool is not allowed to publish on the App Store, so you can’t download it from the App Store. It’s a safe tool, feel free to download it and perform lost file recovery on Mac.
Step 1. Choose File Types to Scan
Connect your Seagate external hard drive with your Mac, making sure it appears like an external hard drive on your Mac. Next, launch the Seagate file recovery Mac software and select the file types you’re going to recover from the Seagate device. After then, click 'Start'.
Step 2. Choose Seagate External Hard Drive to Scan
In the next step, you can see all the partitions, external hard drives on the Mac are listed. From the list, choose Seagate external hard drive from which you want to recover data from, and click 'Scan'. It takes a while for the software to scan for the files you need from the Seagate external hard drive. Be patient. The default scan mode is Quick Scan.
Step 3. Recover Files from Seagate External Hard Drive on Mac
How To Format Seagate Expansion Hard Drive For Mac
After the Quick Scan, you can see all the complete files the software has found for you. Filter out the needed files from the left side with file types and file extension. Preview the files and choose need to recover from Seagate external hard drive on Mac.
Format Seagate External Hard Drives
By default, the used scan mode is Quick Scan. If you still can’t find the deleted or lost files from Seagate external hard drive. I suggest you try the Deep Scan. The Seagate external hard drive file recovery Mac program will scan files even with incomplete file properties for you. Longer means more files found. Try your luck.