Thursday, January 8, 2015

I'm a Mac, He's a PC. Why can't we backup together?

We need to back it all up.  My mac stuff and his PC stuff.

I have a Seagate GoFlex 1TB networked drive that I thought would solve all our problems. 
It doesn't.

My music files contain 7687 items resulting in 61 GB
My photo files contain 28,645 items resulting in 50 GB.

I followed the directions for using a goflex with both a mac and pc here

But, what happens is that this renders the drive incompatable with Time Machine. 

The seagate site also states:
To use a goflex drive with Time Machine (backup software that comes with a Mac), it should be formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled (HFS+) and GUID. 
This renders it usless with the PC.

WTH?
My options are to format it for my mac and timemachine but it won't work with the PC, or format it for both which renders it useless with Time Machine.

The problem with not using Time Machine on a Mac:
Well, I thought I could simply not use time machine.  <insert evil laugh>
I can drag and drop stuff from my Mac to the goflex.
I easily select 'make a copy' within my itunes library, point to the goflex, and it works.  It took 50 hours, but it worked.
But there isn't such an option for iphoto.  The Mac coughs when I try to drag and drop my iphoto library file.  This is a single 62GB file.  ouch.
I can manually 'export' all the pictures, but not in one shot.  Currently, I've created a smart playlist for each year, and manually exported the .jpg's into individual folders.  But this isn't ideal.

I believe I will buy an external Mac hard drive for incremental backups using Time Machine and use the Seagate for long term storage, and piecemeal backups.

Any other thoughts?



No comments:

Post a Comment