I currently have a 4TB My Book. I have previously used it to back up data on my PC laptop. Unfortunately, my house was broken into and my laptop was stolen - thankfully, my external hard drive was left untouched.
I have the opportunity to purchase a MacBook that is far nicer than what I could get with a PC of the same price. Obviously, this poses a problem for my external hard drive which has been formatted to a PC. How can I convert My Book without losing all my data? Will I have to have access to a secondary hard drive? If so, should this hard drive be optimized for Mac or PC, and should I complete the process on Mac or PC?
you can’t … formatting a hard drive to a different file system will erase all data.
(edit: ok sure, you could run data recovery on a formatted drive to attempt to recover the data but … it will take DAYS to run/recover the data from a 4TB HDD, and lastly there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to recover 100% of your data or if any at all … oh, and course, data recovery requires another hard drive to recover the data to)
If you have formatted the My Book to NTFS … then you’ll need NTFS software for Mac
If you have formatted the My Book to exFAT then the Mac should read it … as exFAT is compatible with Windows and iOS
Last option, buy another 4TB hard drive (it’s always good to have a backup drive of all your data) … format it exFAT, borrow a Windows PC/Laptop from a friend, plug both hard drives in via USB, copy the data from the NTFS 4TB to the exFAT 4TB
then you can format the NTFS 4TB to whatever you want and then copy/backup the files from the exFAT 4TB onto it.
You will have 2 Hard drives now with the same data on them … if ones fails, then you have the other as a backup. (i have many duplicate hard drives for all my data)
I"m using Mac OSX 10.15.2 that I can read data from my formatted drive on Windows 10. I think OSX 10.14.6 - 10.15.2 you can read the files from NTFS drive but you can’t write files to the NTFS formatted drive. This might help you with your data backup from NTFS formatted drive the HFS format drive on Mac.
I have just install the lastest WD Discovery app for Mac. When I plug my NFTS/PC formatted drive, WD Discovery give me an option to install Paragon NTFS. Now I’m able to read/write to my NTFS formatted drive.
