I use both Macs, operating mostly OS 10.3, but can also use 10.4, at home and my computers at work which are Dell 8300 and 8400's using Windows Media Center Edition and XP Professional. I have a Dell 700m with XP Pro that I can travel with. It only has a 40 GB 4200 RPM HD, which is always full, mostly due to large image files. I have 1000s of pictures from my digital cameras (4-8 MP) most of which are in the 2-4 MB size range. My Canon SD550 can also take pretty descent movies, but these are 100 MB/minute! I have a large, but mostly old collection of MP3's as well - lots of DJ mixsets, many are 50-100 MB each.
To help avoid the cost of a new (and expensive HD) for the 700m, I bought a $109.00 400GB Seagate PATA drive to store all of this large file (almost all MP3's and JPGs are over 2MB) stuff. Many files are stored on Dell/Windows drives, many files are stored on Apple/Mac drives. Some are stored in both.
After reading stuff from the net, I just spent all day formatting the drive into 3, 32GB FAT32 Basic drives (E, F, G drives) and 1 Extended Partition into which I formatted 4 more 32GB FAT32 Logical drives (H I J K drives) and 3 roughly 50GB NTFS logical drives (L M N drives). All done via the 700m, XP disk manager. Due to a bad cable in my external enclosure, (which I replaced after hours of frustration) I may have had additional problems, and gave up on Seagate's software. The drive part number on the retail box ST3400632A-RK was also 1 number different than the P/N on the drive itself -633A!
I can use existing drives and DVDs for back up. (Most info on the net said NOT to use DVD RW for this purpose, but good quality DVD+ or - R should be ok for years). I want to be able to access these via my external drive with my Macs and PCs. I realize Mac can only read, but not write into a NTFS partition.
My questions:
1. Is there good and **easy to use** software out there that will let me save a copy of my pictures, 2-4 MB each now, down to about 100-200KB each, while leaving the file names pretty much intact? Something that should be ok for most picture sharing purposes. A batch process would be desired. I tried photoshop in MAC for this, seemed way too difficult. The pics could be converted via either Mac or Windows software, preferably freeware or adequately enabled demo /shareware.
2. Will my methods allow **easy** uploading and downloading of desired files? Is this the correct way to proceed?
3. For long term back up storage of the files (so I can clean off some hard drives), are high quality DVDs ok (+R or -R, not RW), or should I still keep a copy on another HD?
4. I have not decided if I will put either a Mac OS or a Windows version on the HD (apparently at drive position E). Any comments appreciated here.
I hope I posted to the correct forum and sorry if I posted too much detail.
To help avoid the cost of a new (and expensive HD) for the 700m, I bought a $109.00 400GB Seagate PATA drive to store all of this large file (almost all MP3's and JPGs are over 2MB) stuff. Many files are stored on Dell/Windows drives, many files are stored on Apple/Mac drives. Some are stored in both.
After reading stuff from the net, I just spent all day formatting the drive into 3, 32GB FAT32 Basic drives (E, F, G drives) and 1 Extended Partition into which I formatted 4 more 32GB FAT32 Logical drives (H I J K drives) and 3 roughly 50GB NTFS logical drives (L M N drives). All done via the 700m, XP disk manager. Due to a bad cable in my external enclosure, (which I replaced after hours of frustration) I may have had additional problems, and gave up on Seagate's software. The drive part number on the retail box ST3400632A-RK was also 1 number different than the P/N on the drive itself -633A!
I can use existing drives and DVDs for back up. (Most info on the net said NOT to use DVD RW for this purpose, but good quality DVD+ or - R should be ok for years). I want to be able to access these via my external drive with my Macs and PCs. I realize Mac can only read, but not write into a NTFS partition.
My questions:
1. Is there good and **easy to use** software out there that will let me save a copy of my pictures, 2-4 MB each now, down to about 100-200KB each, while leaving the file names pretty much intact? Something that should be ok for most picture sharing purposes. A batch process would be desired. I tried photoshop in MAC for this, seemed way too difficult. The pics could be converted via either Mac or Windows software, preferably freeware or adequately enabled demo /shareware.
2. Will my methods allow **easy** uploading and downloading of desired files? Is this the correct way to proceed?
3. For long term back up storage of the files (so I can clean off some hard drives), are high quality DVDs ok (+R or -R, not RW), or should I still keep a copy on another HD?
4. I have not decided if I will put either a Mac OS or a Windows version on the HD (apparently at drive position E). Any comments appreciated here.
I hope I posted to the correct forum and sorry if I posted too much detail.
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