How To Set Up A Wd Passport For Mac
Sep 25, 2018 - Do you mean just formating the harddrive so it works for Mac? Now click the erase button and set it up like my screenshot.
I am trying to use a recently purchased WD passport on my Macbook Pro. I have been googling and come across various sources saying that I have to partition the drive, but I am unsure of what this means and how exactly to do it. I already selected that I wanted to use TimeMachine with the device, and then began trying to do a backup. It was working, but moving extremely, extremely slow, so I stopped it because I felt as though something was wrong.
Then I tried to do some research on the WD website, which was unhelpful, but ultimately discovered that I probably needed to reformat the drive. My main concerns are: 1) I do not want to use TimeMachine if that means I can only access my backed up files through this computer. I am most interested in having the external hard-drive so that if this computer crashes I have everything saved. Should I make it so that the drive doesn't use time machine? And if so, how?
2) I am unclear about what partitioning does to the drive and exactly how I should be doing it. I have yet to see a step-by-step process for someone who is semi computer dumb. Any help would be soo appreciated!!! Thanks in advance.
First, we need to know how the WD Passport is formatted. Some are formatted to FAT-32 while some of the newer ones are NTFS. Time Machine will only back up to a drive that has been formatted to the Mac file system.
That file system is HFS Extended Journaled. Attach your WD Passport drive to your Mac via a USB cable. When the drive appears on your desktop, right click on the drive and select 'Get info'. Now tell us which format it's using. Post back and we'll go from there. And, welcome to the Mac Forums!
First, we need to know how the WD Passport is formatted. Some are formatted to FAT-32 while some of the newer ones are NTFS. Time Machine will only back up to a drive that has been formatted to the Mac file system.
That file system is HFS Extended Journaled. Attach your WD Passport drive to your Mac via a USB cable. When the drive appears on your desktop, right click on the drive and select 'Get info'. Now tell us which format it's using. Post back and we'll go from there. And, welcome to the Mac Forums!Hi!! Thanks a bunch for the warm welcome.
Nice to meet you chscag! Ok, this is what I see when I 'get info:' Kind: Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) Capacity: 297.74 GB Used: 10.39 GB on disk (11,152,347,136 byes). That is correctly formatted for your Mac. The very first Time Machine backup will take a long time because it is very large. All subsequent backups will be quicker. Time Machine backups are good for what you are describing as your needs. If something goes wrong or you want to just 'go back in time' and revert to the way things were an hour ago, a day ago, whatever.
It will do that for you and you can pretty much undo whatever you just did. 'Oops, deleted my photos and emptied the trash!' They're gone.
External hard drive for mac. Nope, just go back in Time Machine to your last backup and restore those photos. Partitioning is where you 'split' your external into two separate storage devices (basically). That's not very technical speak, but whatever. You would want to partition if say you had more than one machine that you are backing up and want different backups for each machine.
Or if you want to use another back up method in addition to Time Machine. For instance, I have my external hard drive partitioned into 3 partitions. One for my Windows machine backup (that partition has to be formatted differently), one for Time Machine on my Mac, and one for a clone of my Mac's drive.
The clone will enable you to make an EXACT copy of your entire drive and can even boot from it if your Mac completely dies and you can't get that internal drive to start up. It's more or less a good idea just in case. One of those things you hope you never have to use, but never know if you will. It's also good for replacing your internal drive. You can just move everything onto the new drive using your clone. There are two very good cloning apps - SuperDuper!
And Carbon Copy Cloner. I'm pretty sure both have free versions. Hope that helps.
So I'm properly formatted and it's normal for the first backup to take a few hours. Good to know! I have had machines crash on me and lost all my files twice in the past, so I'm most concerned with making sure that doesn't happen again. It seems like you're saying that if I partition my drive, use 'half' for Time Machine (immediate file recovery) and the other for SuperDuper/Carbon Copy I'll be all set and that Carbon Copy, etc will let me open up the files outside of this machine.