Cant back up my work/Pro Tools sessions, help

[Yumid]

so when I am on a PC I can easily back up my work simply by dragging and dropping it from the data drive to my external drive. This is while working on a PC.


But when I am on a MAC I cant drag and drop the same way, it just shows a 'censored' symbol as if to say I cant drop the item there.


Then when I tried saving something right to the external drive it said "cannot save while this drive is trying to open whatever the file name was" I had never heard of the file before it was trying to open, but i assume it has something to do with all the extra read me's and stuff that cant came with the external drive.


I was told if I deleted all the extra stuff off the passport it would help, but It won't let me drag and drop those extra folders into the trash either. Not sure if I make sense or not, but this is important. It won't let me back up any of the work I do at home on my mac, so everything is saved to my drive only.


My external is a Western Digital My Passport Ultra.


How do I customize these passport ultras so they work with mac too? I heard I need to do something along those lines.

 

[DGT]

I'm guessing your Passport is formatted as NTFS (Windows file system). A Mac will read NTFS drives but won't write to them unless you get a third party utility such as Paragon NTFS. The Mac native filesystem is HFS+. If the drive is connected to your Mac then right click on it and select "Get Info". Look where it says "Format", it will most likely be NTFS. If so, just get Paragon NTFS and you'll be able to write to the drive.

If you reformat your drive as HFS+, then you'll be able to read/write to it on all Macs, but PCs will neither recognize, read, nor write to it unless you have a utility like Paragon HFS installed on the PC.

You could format the drive to ExFAT which can be read and written to by both Mac OS and Windows, but I have heard some stability issues with ExFAT, though I have not experienced them firsthand.

Also, it's "Mac" not "MAC", it's an abbreviation, not an acronym.