External HD working on both MAC/PC

Before I say anything, YES, I've read previous threads concerning this ( like this one) on the Forum, but I still need a few answers. I may not know a lot about all this techy terminology but I'm not completely dumb. Just be patient, please! Also, English is not my first language, bare with me.

I have a MacBook (OS X 10.6) and an external hard drive (does it matter the brand? It's Seagate, 500GB) I bought for back-ups/storing files. I formatted it to my Mac as soon as it connected cause I didn't know it wouldn't work on PCs if I did.

I don't own a PC but some friends/family do and I'd like to share some files with them. And I'd also like to save some of the space on the HD to continue using Time Machine/backing up.

1. I read about how to re-format the hard drive on a PC, but if I do, will I be able to read/write files from both Mac and Windows?

2. And if I'm able, can I still create a space on it exclusively for my Time Machine backups?

Thank you in advance!
Isabela

 

1) If you would like to read/write on both OSes, you'll have to format the drive to NTFS and then use a tool like Paragon or NTFS-3G to allow OSX to use NTFS. There's a second way to do this using built-in tools for OSX, but these are disabled for a reason.

Another (safe) way to have the drive work on both computers would be to create two partitions on the drive, one for NTFS (Windows) and another for HFS+ (OSX). No compability problems whatsoever, though you won't be able to access files on the NTFS partition unless you follow the steps int he first paragraph.

2) See second paragraph.

 

the best solution is to format it exfat, it works on osx and windows xp sp2 and higher with no fuss

 

forget NTFS... if its external and you want full read/write, you just use exFat

 

I agree with KCE/doh. Format the hard drive with 1 exFAT partition. Use it freely on windows and os x. You can also use it with time machine, which should put all of it's backups in a folder. You can use different folders to hold the files you want to share.

Don't bother with NTFS.

exFat works with:

Windows XP SP2+ and with an update for exFAT ( http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=19364)
Windows Vista SP1 or later
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later

 

To add, OS X can read from NTFS partitions just fine. So if you're only copying data from an external drive formatted that way to your Mac, you'll be fine. As others suggested, formatting the drive to exFAT will give you read/write capability across the board (unless that board happens to contain pre-service-pack versions of XP and Vista).