Ensure your hard drive is formatted correctly

When i was away this weekend at the inlaws, I had a list of small IT requests to take care of, as you do, but while I was there i decided I would grab a backup of his iTunes and iPhoto library. Luckily on the way there I had just picked up a 1TB drive. It states it was compatible with windows/MAc etc, just connect and use.

Well after i had connected the drive it mounted fine, but i could not copy anything to the drive, when I looked in Disk Utility the drive was formatted as NTFS so obviously I could not write to the drive, so I formatted the drive as FAT.

 

As soon I done this, I grabbed a copy of the iTunes library without a problem. However when. Tried to grab the iphoto library which was 51gb, whenever it got to 200Mb it would flash up an error saying it could not copy the file as a file of the same name already exists.

I knew this could not be the case as it's a new drive, so after a little searching around I found an article which stated to copy an iPhoto library that large the external drive would be to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).  Once I had done this the copy went across fine, so if you need to manually back up some files ensure you have the drive formatted correctly.

I am always interested in feedback so feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me  here, also if you would like to submit a quick tip  with full credit and links back to your site then also feel free to contact me.

 

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