External Drive for Backup

jackw · April 19, 2018

Hi everyone,

I recently just got the new MacBook Pro (Don't worry, still got my Windows rig as a daily driver as well ) due to my last laptop failing.

I lost ALL of my data on my last laptop with no chance of backing it up which was a huuuuge bummer since I'm in my last year of university. With that said, I want to take the precautions and buy an external drive to backup my data on.

Whilst looking at drives, I stumbled upon this one and had a couple questions...

1. If I had the 512GB drive, would I be able to backup my entire laptop (which is only 256GB) AND store other files on the drive outside of the laptop backup? (IE: Movies, Pictures, etc. that aren't locally stored on my mac)

2. Are external SSD's really any reliable when it comes to using for backups? I'd only be backing up at most once a week or every few days. I really looked at this one because of the transfer speed advantage over USB-C.

3. Would the drive listed above, or the Samsung T5 for example, be backward compatible with my Windows rig that just has good old USB 3.0?

Any and all answers are appreciated!

Thanks!

Electronics Wizardy · April 19, 2018

1. Yep, you can store backups and other files.

3. No reason to get a ssd, here, a 2tb hdd would be a much better solution here as you don't need the speed.

3. Yep it will work with older usb version.

Id just get this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TKFEE5S/ref=twister_B00TS6JL4S?_encoding=UTF8&th=1

Psittac · April 19, 2018

I recently got this external drive in 4tb and I'm more than certain that the reviews I watched on it said it was compatible for mac. Take that with a grain of salt because they were low view count video's. But what I remember from them is that it was a file type more than anything that made it compatible with mac. (which would lead me to believe a format would solve the problem)

I don't know anything about the apple ecosystem but a hard drive should be a hard drive, usb should be usb and usb to sata should be usb to sata. But again I know nothing about mac.

I just dug around for the review that sold me on the knee jerk buy I made and it's not the one that says it works with mac.

I guess all I can do is comment on my vague thoughts about apple. You pay a premium for ease of use. There is a chance that you can get just any external drive and make it work, but that comes with research and tinkering which apple is not prone to. There are entire mac OS systems running on non-mac hardware but again, that involves massive amounts of effort to make work. (it's called hackintosh). My point is that for less than your 512gb drive listed here you could have a 4tb drive if it wasn't for the mac OS. If you want to put the leg work in and take a risk of it not working, you could get a larger drive for cheaper.

edit: there is a good possiblity of recovering your data, there are entire companies dedicated to retrieving data from dead drives. It all comes down to how much your wallet cares about your data.

seagate_surfer · April 19, 2018

10 hours ago, Psittac said:

I recently got this external drive in 4tb and I'm more than certain that the reviews I watched on it said it was compatible for mac. Take that with a grain of salt because they were low view count video's. But what I remember from them is that it was a file type more than anything that made it compatible with mac. (which would lead me to believe a format would solve the problem)

I don't know anything about the apple ecosystem but a hard drive should be a hard drive, usb should be usb and usb to sata should be usb to sata. But again I know nothing about mac.

I just dug around for the review that sold me on the knee jerk buy I made and it's not the one that says it works with mac.

Just wanted to share a little bit of info from a storage manufacturer perspective here. You're on the right track that which OS a drive is compatible is less about the physical drive itself being compatible/incompatible in some way, and more to do with the file system format. Some drives get branded "for Mac" because they either have a Mac-branded look and/or come preformatted for the Mac.

Mac and Windows each have a file system type that is considered mainstream to them, Mac's is called HFS+ (newer gen SSD file system they're integrating is APFS) and Windows' is called NTFS. There are a couple of ways to get around this restriction, however. The first, and probably most common, is to format/reformat to what is called exFAT, which is a file system that both Mac and Windows can understand. However. if you already have files on the drive as either NTFS or HFS+ that you don't want to lose via reformatting, then there is a driver you can get called Paragon, which actually allows Mac to handle NTFS and Windows to handle HFS+, so no need for a reformat. Some users prefer this method because exFAT is considered to be somewhat more susceptible to file corruption.