One of the things that I am faced with every time the course begins is many colleagues who buy external hard drives or USB sticks to use in their MacBooks and also in the computers of the center that have Windows.
For this reason, it must be taken into account that the macOS system works with a different file system than the one used in Windows, so if when you buy the external disk or USB memory If the format is not compatible, it will not be able to be used in both systems at the same time.
Therefore, you have to know what you have to do before you go to enter information within it and then the process is more laborious. If when we connect a hard drive or external memory to our Mac it does not allow us to record files but to take files from it means that the unit must be formatted so that it is compatible with both systems.
To do this we just have to connect the unit to the Mac and then go to Launchpad> OTHERS folder> Disk Utility.
In the window that appears, you will see that the unit appears in the left sidebar. We select the unit and then in the upper part of the window we click on delete. The system will show us a small window with a drop-down menu in which we must select MS-DOS. Then to finish the process, click on delete.
When you finish the process, the device is already foraged to be used in both systems.
Keep in mind that when you connect a new external hard drive to your Mac, the system asks if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. You just have to say that you don't want it for that and start using it as a normal hard drive.
It seems to me that the best way for a pendrive to be compatible with Mac and Windows is with the FAT-EX format, which is an improved evolution of the FAT-32. I doubt that formatting it with MS-DOS is compatible with MacOS
Hi Joan, you are right that EX-FAT is another option for when you want to transfer files larger than 4GB but that file format is slower in reading and writing later. I invite you to do an MNS-DOS erasure in macOS so that you realize that it is effectively compatible with Windows and macOS, as well as that the read-write time is higher. So if you are not going to transfer files larger than 4GB, the one I have mentioned is more feasible. Thanks for the input.
Tuxera + ntfs formatting and you're done
but when foraging you erase the contents of the external disk ???