Seagate Backup Plus (external hare drive) questions

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum and not super tech-savvy, so my apologies if this is a newbie type of question. Here's my scenario:

I just purchased a Seagate Backup Plus external hard drive with 2TB of storage capacity. The box states that you can "use between Windows and Mac". However, I want to make sure I do this right before I do anything with it. In the past I've had various issues with this actually being true.

I need to be able to read and write data amongst three computers, 2 macs and 1 PC. I'm going to be going to a recording studio (mac 1) and asking for him to make a copy of the stuff we edit together and put the copy on this hard drive. Then, I'm going to be working with this data on two different computers. My home base computer is a PC (PC 1). However, I also work on the road a lot. The computer I work with on the road is a mac book pro (mac 2). I will need to be able to read and write amongst all three of these computers.

How do I make sure that I can do that?

Thanks,
selinakyle

 

In order for a drive to be able to be read and written to in both a PC and Mac computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format. FAT32 has several limitations, including a 4 GB per-file limit. This is a file system limitation that affects both Mac's and PC's, and the only workaround is to format the drive to exFAT. The easiest way to do this is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility or Windows' built-in Disk Management.