Is formatting Necessary?

[realdereal]

I finished a session yesterday and put my camera card into my MacBook and edit the files at my studio then go home where I supposed I could just take my portable hard drive, transfer the files to the portable hard drive from my Mac and then get the files from the portable hard drive to burn a CD from my PC (running Windows).

However when I went to transfer the images from the session folder on the Mac to the portable hard drive it wouldn't go as it was not formatted to "share" the portable hard drive between a PC running Windows and a Mac.

I then opened a new 16GB USB I had and used that to transfer the files from the Mac to my PC to burn to a disc.
I did all this without formatting the USB.

My question is, is this a fool proof plan or will there someday be a need to format the USB thereby making it also incompatible to share data between my MacBook and PC?

{I know I know, just get a Superdrive to do it all at the studio but I would like to know about why I was able to pull off using the new USB and not the portable hard drive}

[Mark von Kanel]

Hi Kristen, have a read of this it should solve your problem i think you may have had the card formatted with the wrong file system.

http://osxdaily.com/2012/04/22/forma...pc-compatible/

[inkista]

Your easiest solution (hopefully), would be to format the portable drive as exFAT.

If you format it as FAT32 (as in Mark's link above), as your USB thumb drive is probably formatted, that will work as well, but file size will be limited to 4GB. Probably ok for photos, but if you want to start transferring video, then you may be out of luck. exFAT is a newer format that does not have the 4GB file size limit, and is both read-and-write capable from OSX and Windows and Linux (assuming you have a version of the OS that groks exFAT).

[Mark von Kanel]

One other thing Kristan, once you have got your file system sorted its best to reformat in the device your recording from to maximize speed/life of the card, if you record data from multiple devices you should re format in each new device before use.