My MacBook pro just died and I am mid way through editing a documentary video project. I have all of my footage backed up on a passport for Mac. However, I am considering replacing my laptopmac with a pc laptop anddon’t know if I can reformat my hard drive to be compatible with windows without the risk of losing or corrupting my video files. I can see that there are methods for reformatting Mac drives to be compatible with windows but it doesn’t seem clear to me whether this is a safe option. For the sake of this project - should I stick with Mac so as not to lose my data on this external harddrive?
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There are programs out there that will allow you to READ Mac formatted (HFS) drives on PC.
My suggestion is to try them out, and see if you can copy your data to a different drive before you reformat your passport.
ALSO: If your My Passport happened to be formatted exFAT (which is compatible with both PC and Mac) you need not do anything.
Reformatting your drive will lose all your data. Is it possible for you to arrange another Mac? If yes, try to copy your drive data on Mac. Else you should first leverage data recovery software to recover data from the drive. After recovering data, use HFS file explorer program to make your drive compatible with windows.
