Backing up with Smartware to exFAT Win/Mac

Hi,

I am wondering if anyone has any experience using Smartware to backup to a exFAT My Passport. I have a 2TB My Passport, using NTFS at the moment. I am planning on moving to use the exFAT file system on the drive to be able to use it also on my Mac at work.

My main concern is, that I would like to be able to continue to backup both my home PC (windows 7) using Smartware and the Mac that I use at work using Smartware.

I’m just wondering if Smartware (not Smartware Pro), would continue to identify the My Passport in exFAT as compatible with Smartware and would it allow me to backup both on a Mac and a PC without issue?

I know that Time Machine will not backup to an exFAT drive, so that is out of the question. And I am not awfully interested in partitioning the drive and using both NTFS and HFS+ on the individual partitions.

Any help advise or experience will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Hi,

The WD Smartware won’t recognize the drive if is formatted on exFAT and you wont be able to perform the backup properly.

Please see page 1 of the user manual regarding  hard drive support

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/4779-705057.pdf

ERmorel, thanks so much for your reply.

Before you had time to reply, I was impulsive and had already formated my drive to exFAT at home.

Actually, my testing showed that Smartware running on Windows 7 works fine with exFAT, as far as I can tell. I know a couple of hours of backing up isn’t extensive testing, but all seems to be backing up as normal on my two Windows 7 machines running Smartware.

But you were absolutely correct, because today at work on a Mac, I noticed there is no way to backup unless you are using HFS+. Any Mac OS X backup program requires the HFS+ file system.

So I’ve decided to make 2 partitions to the drive, a small partition of the drive about 300GB formated in HFS+, that I will use with Time Machine for Mac OS X backups. The big partition will be whatever is left (~1.7TB) and formated in exFAT, which I will use to backup Windows 7 with Smartware and to store files from both Mac and PC.

If anyone has any warnings or advice, concerning such a setup please leave a reply.

Thanks in advance