[Lancer409]

I want to back up files on my powerbook and on my pc with an external harddrive (thinking about buying an external enclosure and an internal drive and using it as a GIGANTIC flash drive (usb thumbdrive) for BOTH the powerbook and my windows desktop. flash drives work fine shuttling files from powerbook to pc and vice versa. will a external harddrive work as well? will i be able to use it with both my windows and osx machine? Will one or the other operating systems not recognize it? or will it function as i need it to?

any tips about what i need to know, or good enclosures to recommend? Thanks a bunch .. I'm such a newbie at these things

[Jens Peter]

Yes,it is possible to have a gigantic flashdrive...

You just need to format the disc to FAT32. You can do this from Disc Utility, just select DOS formatting, then both OS X and Windows can see and use it.

As for an enclosure, I would recomend a enclusore with both USB2 and Firewire, as many win-machines don't have firewire.

[Macka]

Check this link for info on the process

http://macosxhints.com/article.php?s...30613121738812

[Ruahrc]

Yeah you will need to format it as FAT32. If you are doing automatic backups using backup software you will first need to make sure that the software you use can do FAT32 drives from OS X. For example I tried silverscreen from LaCie and it would not write to a FAT32 partition.

Synk on the other hand worked and I find it to be an excellent program.

Ruahrc

[Ryan1524]

Macdrive 5 is your friend. it allows PCs to read HFS+ volumes.