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EXFAT formatting of drives for clients – how do I make them truly mac/PC compatible?
I have hd good and bad luck on this, the results have been inconsistent. Client presents me with a brand new sealed 3 Tb MyBook USB drive for me to load up with various finished edits and file outputs and even the raw footage, etc. I use the mac’s disk utility to make this drive in EXFAT, which *should* make it readable both by macs and PC’s. Sixteen hours of file transfer later, I try reading this drive from my mac and from a local office PC and I can see everything is on it. Test payback of an .MOV file works… so I hand this drive off to the client, and I hear nothing for a week. Then the call comes:
“I plugged this into my PC and it says the drive is empty, asks if I want to reformat it.”
Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.Anybody have some insights? Suggestions? The last time this happened, I reformatted in EXFAT AGAIN a second time, but using a PC instead of the mac. Then hooked it to the mac and file transferred for 16 hours from the mac again… Afterwords, it apparently was readable on PC but I’m not sure this alone is the answer. It would be nice to tell the client to do xyz procedure on their PC to make the drive readable without having to re-do the entire transfer job.
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4 Replies
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The alternative is to get a utlity that lets the Mac read write to NTFS drives. I tried a fee version and it was slow.
I have the opposite in that I have gone to PC for Resolve & Adobe so I run MacDrive software that lets me read/write & format HFS+. If your clients PC had MacDrive there would be no issue. It is excellent software.
EXFAT and FAT32 are formats that I avoid. If only Windows and Mac would just get over it they can both handle these drive formats. My office computer runs Linux Mint and I can read/write format heaps of OS formats. Ironically HFS+ is the only problem. Apple can be stubborn.
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So, is there a freeware version of something like MacDrive for PC’s out there someone can recommend? This is a government client, which means they have zero money to pay for anything.
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I don’t know of freeware but seriously if a government can’t afford $50 then how do they govern?
The software does have a free 5 day trial. Don’t know if that makes limitations on usage.
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Paragon NTFS for Mac is 20 bucks. If the client is important to you, just get it. The freeware stuff is crap.
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