External hard drive for Macbook

BikerEd

DominicQuick wrote: »

1 - Dont buy a LACIE as they break after 14 months and they dont offer extended warranty. Even the rugged ones are rubbish.

My Lacie Quadra has a 3 year warranty as standard with the option to uplift with fast postage-paid replacement. It is one of the best drives I have ever owned.

Trouble is with questions like this that everyone has a different experience and opinion to offer. Me, I would never buy a Western Digital after my business suffered a batch failure which affected hundreds of their drives. They may be better now but that one disaster was enough to put me off them for life.

Marty_J

cyberbob wrote: »

The problem I have is that I have about 2TB of photographs so if I burned them all to disc it would start getting a bit silly. Also discs can have problems as well. There is no 100% safe method. At present I have two backup drives on different home servers.

You might consider pruning your collection of photos. I sat down one afternoon and went through my photo library, deleting all the photos I no longer wanted. I tend to take quite a few photos of the same thing, altering the settings each time, and the angle of the shot and so on, so I just selected the best one and got rid of all the rest. I also got rid of photos that were over/under exposed, out of focus, and ones I just didn't like.

I think I shaved about 30% off the size of my library, and it makes browsing through my photos much more pleasant as I don't have multiples of anything or technically bad shots.

It's a worthwhile exercise for someone with a lot of photos.

marksoton

almillar wrote: »

That's an NTFS partition you're looking at with Windows programmes on it. They're useless to a Mac user. You need to reformat your drive to use it with your Mac.
Connect the drive. Goto Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility to format.
is best if only using the drive with a Mac (Windows can't use it)
NTFS is best for use with Windows (OSX can only read, not write it)
FAT is best for use with both Windows and OSX. The only problem here is that you can't place a single file of over 4gb onto this file system.

Hi all. Sorry been away with work so saw no point posting as the hard drive was at home.

Well i have gone into utilities,partition and changed it to MacOS Extended Journaled case sensitive.

Problem is it's now not showing in my applications ! Where am i going wrong ?

almillar

When you plug it into your mac, it should appear after a couple of seconds on your desktop. If you double click it you can drag stuff in. Remeber to 'eject' it before unplugging!

Marty_J

marksoton wrote: »

Problem is it's now not showing in my applications ! Where am i going wrong ?

Why would it show up in your Applications?

It'll mount on your desktop.