I'M new & Need advice with "My Book" partitioning

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

:neutral_face: I’m new to this forum so please excuse blunders. I have a couple of issues that I need help with.

 (1) I have “My Book” connected to my “Mac Book Pro”. and it has been backing up everything (I think). It is making multiple entries, even daily, to a folder “Macintosh H.D.” with sub-folders that appear much like my Internal HD entries such as “Applications, Library, etc”.  Is this what I should be doing? and if so, how do I locate a particlar item that I want to see without opening ever folder and file ?

(2) I’m using my Mac mostly for photo’s with Photoshop elements. I’m thinking maybe I should partition the external HD to file photos separate from the other stuff.  If so HOW DO I ACCOMPLISH THAT? 

(3) I’ll bet, in this forum, If I have multiple issues, I should generate separate Posts for each ??

Thanks for your indulgence.

GaryA

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Use only a single partition. If you are using it just for macs, format HFS+. If you are using it just for PCs format it NTFS. Otherwise format FAT32 to use it on both. If you need to use a drive on both OS’s and have large files (bigger than 4GB) your best bet is to get a Network drive and map it to each machine on the network.

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I believe if you format Fat 32 the volume size is limited to 32 gig. Do a litttle research instead of just jumping in for a fast solution.

Joe

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That is incorrect. Windows will only allow you to format to 32GB, however third party utilities will let you format in FAT32 using much larger drives. The only reason Windows can’t do this is because Microsoft intentionally crippled the formatting ability in order to promote NTFS. It was the right thing to do (FAT32 file limitations were becoming increasingly annoying back than) but it caused a lot of confusion among users.

See the following MS article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q314463&

Also the following page lists a few of the (MANY) options for formatting to FAT32 on a large sized drive: http://aadhu.com/2008/04/30/format-fat32-over-32gb-on-xpvista/

Finally here is WD’s (slightly outdated) article on the subject: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=332

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Perhaps you can provide a little extra info.

Specifically:

  1. how large is your internal hard drive? How large is your MyBook?

  2. assuming you did place your photo files on your external drive (note I’m not making a recommentation to do that) do you perceive a need to access those files from a Windows machine?

  3. is Time Machine configured and working on your machine? It sounds like it might be but… If it is, presumably the destination drive for T.M. (i.e. where the backups are placed) is the external drive. Is that the case?

  4. how many GB of photos do you have? How many GB do you add, oh, per month? More generally, how many GB (guess) of total files do you add per month? (note I’m not asking about backups, just the files you add or modify).