Hello… I have a MacBook Pro running macOS Catalina 10.15.4. I just purchased an 8TB My Book to connect to it. (On rare occasions I may have to connect the My Book to an old PC laptop running Windows 7, but I can do without that functionality if necessary.)
On the MacBook Pro I have Paragon NTFS for Mac installed and updated to the current version 15.5.66. I also installed the WD apps; i.e., WD Discovery, which in turn contains WD Drive Utilities and WD Security.
I also have a Seagate Personal Cloud which I’ve been using as my backup drive. Lately I’ve had issues with it, which is why I just bought the My Book. I didn’t buy another cloud drive because I no longer need personal cloud functionality. My goal is to move everything from the old Seagate Personal Cloud to the new My Book. Just like with the Seagate drive, I will need both read and write capabilities on the My Book, and I need to be able to use Finder to work with my files.
Hopefully that’s enough background info… now here are my questions. The My Book comes out of the box formatted as ExFAT. Should I leave it as is and go ahead with migrating to it all my files from the Seagate Cloud, or should I re-format My Book as NTFS before I begin the migration? If I re-format first to NTFS, will I lose any functionality that I would have if I leave it alone and keep it as ExFAT? Like, for instance, would I still be able to use all the utilities that came with My Book, including encryption, setting up a password, whatever, etc.? And are there any other considerations that maybe I haven’t thought of, and wouldn’t even know to ask?
Thanks for your help! Stay healthy and safe!
