Shared Backup Storage Between a Mac and a PC

[Starbuck1975]

My wife runs a G4, I will shortly be running a WIN7 based PC. I have about half our family photos on my internal back-up hard drive, my wife has the other half on her primary drive with no back-up capabilities.

She does not have wireless capabilities.

I would like to setup one external back-up drive that we can both use. I went to the Apple Store, but they were not sure how to setup such a configuration. I went to Micro Center, and their "Apple guy" recommended the following but he was not entirely sure. He told me:

1. Purchase a 2TB network drive that is compatible to both Apple and PC.
2. Connect the drive via ethernet to a router and configure as a network drive.
3. From the PC, partition the drive in half, and format each partition to FAT32.

He said under this configuration, I should set one partition as my backup drive and she should set the other partition as her backup drive, that way we don't accidentally overwrite one another. He also stated we should be able to read files from both partitions.

Can anyone confirm?

Also I have never setup a home network before. I am sure I can figure out the basics, but mostly concerned about security.

 

[TheStu]

That sounds like it would work. Bear in mind that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit (if an individual file is 4.1GB it won't copy) and that if the G4 is on Leopard then Time Machine needs HFS+.

 

[Emulex]

buy each a $59 external drive and go to town dude.

 

[sourceninja]

format drive to fat32. Install crashplan on both machines. Point crashplan on both machines at drive.

Profit.

 

[Eug]

FAT32 has the 4GB file size limitation, and there are certain restrictions for filenames. Not really a very good solution in 2010 for modern OSes.

 

[sourceninja]

well, you could format it as ntfs, share it via samba/windows file sharing and still use crashplan on both machines to target it.

Or you could use it as a local disk formatted ntfs or hfs on the mac or the pc. Set crashplan up to target the disk on that machine, and set crashplan on the other machine to target the machine with the usb device.

 

[Cal166]

Format it to NTFS and and purchase this software for your wife's OSX so she can write to NTFS...

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

 

[Starbuck1975]

Thanks everyone. I wasn't aware of the FAT32 restrictions, so I will probably format the share drive to NTFS.

I am not familiar with samba/windows file sharing and crashplan, so I need to do a little more reading.

I will also look into the Paragon solution offered.

One quick question. I essentially need a backup solution for sharing and backing up family photos across a Mac and PC. Our current process is burning DVDs and passing them, which is highly inefficient.

Is there any way for both my wife and I to USB connect to say an external drive, with both of us having read/write access, using a mix of the solutions you all already offered?
Sourceninja I think your recommendation was going down that path, but I could use a bit more technical details on what you proposed.

Thank you.

 

[Eug]

Format it to NTFS and and purchase this software for your wife's OSX so she can write to NTFS...

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Or you can format it to HFS+ and purchase software for the Windows machine to write to HFS+.

MacDrive

However, may just be easier just to have two drives, or at least, two partitions.

What I do is have a drive connected to my Mac, and access it from the Windows PC, but that's because it's all my own data, and I want it centralized.

The main problem is that it's slightly more glitchy going Windows to Mac than going Mac to Mac. I'm not convinced OS X's Windows file sharing implementation is the greatest.

 

[sourceninja]

Or don't buy NTFS for mac and instead just use this http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ so your mac can read ntfs.

It might be a tad slower, but it's worked great for me for years and vmware uses it for fusion plus it's free and open source. (Youl would also need to install the NTFS-3G )

 

[Starbuck1975]

Thank you all for the great inputs. I am afraid my technical skills are somewhat lacking in configuring the setups you mentioned. I can usually figure things out once someone points me in the right direction.

Would one of you mind walking me through the steps I would need to follow in configuring a shared Mac/PC NTFS external hard drive?

 

[TheStu]

Or don't buy NTFS for mac and instead just use this http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ so your mac can read ntfs.

It might be a tad slower, but it's worked great for me for years and vmware uses it for fusion plus it's free and open source. (Youl would also need to install the NTFS-3G )

It isn't a tad slower, it is half the speed. Writing to NTFS with MacFUSE yields about 50MB/s transfers. Writing those same files with Paragon nets me 90-100MB/s transfers. When you are talking 100GB of files, that speed makes a huge difference.

However, for $0, it is a steal for twice the price.

 

[vbuggy]

The whole point of the Mac is its Fisher-Priceness. Take that away and it works a lot worse.

And on the flipside, if you want to Win7 can also be made pretty dumb-it-down friendly for things which should be no-brainers - including backup.

The advice is Keep it Simple.

Get two backup drives. Let's face it, even a terabyte backup drive is crazy cheap these days. Mac = HFS. Win = NTFS. Use Time Machine (+ Superduper if necessary) on the Mac, use Windows Backup on 7.

Don't bother with network backup unless you're prepared to make a decent investment in this - USB storage enabled routers have barely enough horsepower to power their normal actions, let alone moving data across a network - as evidenced by the abysmal performance of most devices like this, of which Time Crapsule is but one example.

 

[KeithP]

I essentially need a backup solution for sharing and backing up family photos across a Mac and PC.

You could get a Flikr Pro account for $25 per year. Then each of you could upload your photos to that account. This would give you an offsite copy of your files and a place to make them easily accessible to others should you choose to do so.

Another idea would be to copy all the files over to one machine, say the windows box, and then use something like Carbonite or BackBlaze to back up that system online. Ideally, you would also have a second drive on this machine for a local back up as well.

Finally, as someone else pointed out, you can simply buy an external drive for each machine and handle the back ups separately.

-Keith

 

[Emulex]

WHS from HP can do time machine and backup all windows pc's. better grab one before they are gone!

 

[vbuggy]

Network Time Machine backups aren't hands-off - they're flaky, be it on the Time Crapsule or the HP WHS's. Forget it.

As someone else pointed out, it's also a better idea to stick photos, etc up in the cloud. Smugmug, Flickr, etc.

You could also use Dropbox (the paid-for version) to no-brainer-store stuff you want to share between computers. This will mean you'll have a copy of the Dropbox'd stuff on your computers while simultaneously having a copy up on the web.

 

[VinylxScratches]

Setup a external drive on the Win7. Make it a share. Point the Mac to it via SMB. Use Rsync to back it up. Use SyncToy on Windows to back it up.

Done.

 

[pennhunter482]

Any reason not to use exFAT? I just formatted a 80gb external in this format and it seems to work great with both my PC and Macbook.

 

[silverpig]

rsync

 

[PCTC2]

Use CrashPlan (http://crashplan.com) to backup to each other's computer. It's free to backup between your own computers. Or better yet, buy CrashPlan Central for $180 for 3 years.

 

[nerp]

WHS from HP can do time machine and backup all windows pc's. better grab one before they are gone!

WHS doesn't support Macs. Wish it did, since I have a W7 box, an MCE box, an iMac, Macbook and Thinkpad. Would be nice if my WHS box took care of my Macs too. Oh well.

 

[TheStu]

WHS doesn't support Macs. Wish it did, since I have a W7 box, an MCE box, an iMac, Macbook and Thinkpad. Would be nice if my WHS box took care of my Macs too. Oh well.

You can use TimeMachine on WHS, so what do you mean it doesn't support Macs? If it has SMB it should work.