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Seagate Backup Drive Mac Os: What You Need to Know Before Buying



Seagate has evaluated current product lines to determine which ones will be supported in macOS 10.15. Older drives that are not listed here may work, but have not been tested. Notes: This is a general compatibility article and not a troubleshooting article. If the drive is not being detected by the computer, click here to see this article.If you are installing Seagate software for the first time, there is a security feature that was introduced in macOS 10.13 and has continued into the latest version of macOS which is covered in this article here.Current products




Seagate Backup Drive Mac Os




Your Seagate External Drive may come with software, so there may be additional ways to use your drive not listed in this article. This article covers ways to use your drive without having to install any additional software. Unless your drive says 'for Mac' on the front of the box then the drive will be formatted for Windows.In a Windows-based computer, there is no need to do anything special or additional to make the drive work. Simply plug in the power, plug in the USB cable, and the drive should appear in (My) Computer/This PC and Windows Explorer/File Explorer. For Mac, you will need to reformat the drive prior to using it because it will be read-only on a Mac, which means you will be unable to copy or move data to the drive. See the Mac section for more details. Using the drive with Windows:If you are looking to move the data manually, then you can use an option below:


For Windows 7:How to setup a backupHow to manually move your data to the drive in Windows:Drag and dropHere we will discuss dragging a piece of data from the (My) Documents folder to the external drive. This exercise can be repeated with one file, many files, one folder or many folders.


To set the drive up for Mac storage only you will want to make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is also referred to as HFS+. Once formatted you will be able to move data to the drive just as you would a flash drive. If you are looking to move your iPhoto, Photos, or iTunes library, please consult Apple support. For formatting instructions, see these articles:


Apple Time Machine is automatic backup software built into the macOS. The best approach is to only use the drive for Time Machine and do not store additional data on the drive. For any additional support outside of what is provided, please consult Apple support.


Most drives will come formatted for Windows, but Time Machine requires that the drive be formatted for a Mac, called Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or HFS+. If the drive is not formatted correctly the backup will fail with a message that the disk is not in Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which is required. For formatting instructions, see these articles:


Current Backup Plus and GoFlex drives come with their sleep timer disabled to allow the computer to control when the drive goes to sleep. There is not a way to adjust this setting on the Mac but if you have access to a Windows PC you can change it. The setting is in the drive so the sleep settings will follow it regardless of what computer you use it on.


If you do decide to use your drive with Time Machine and you are using macOS version 10.9.5+, you will not be able to run a Mobile Backup from the Seagate Dashboard software to the Seagate drive. This is due to a Time Machine drive permissions limitation introduced in 10.9.5.


The driver provides read and write access for Seagate external drives in Windows without having to reformat.Note: Not compatible with drives formatted with Apple File System (APFS).


I believe that your external hard drive is currently NTFS formatted. Sadly, macOS doesn't natively provide write access to NTFS formatted media. You have to resort to 3rd party drivers to get write access to their media. There are at least two commercial NTFS drivers available:


From the details given, the windows machine most likely formatted the new hard drive with an Ntfs partition. Ntfs has read-only support in OSX 10.3 and above, but you may be able to find some software that allows for OSX to read and write ntfs, such as NTFS-3G.


It seems there is no easy "thumb-drive-like" way to use a hard disk to switch between Mac and Windows machines. I finally had to reformat the unit and will use it with the Mac only. There are in fact, several OEM SW products to enable the function but most seem to require technical expertise that goes beyond what I want to get into and have no integrity guarantee. I will probably use a 32 GB SD card as Exchange media between machines. Still can't uncerstand why isn't it posible to work with hard disks as well as I work with SD cards or thumb drives. And, BTW Seagate should not put the misleading legend on their disk boxes, it must explain the "between" works only in read only mode.


Plug the external drive into the Mac with Disk Utility open, erase the whole partition and set the format to "Mac (Extended) Journaled." It should work from then on. The NFTS is a Windows application and is incompatible with Mac OS. Hope this helps.


No matter your operating system of choice, external hard drives can be useful in many situations. Whether you need to move a few files to another system or do a quick backup, it can never hurt to have a few of them around. But an external hard drive for your Mac is only convenient when you can use it.


Control-click the external drive icon in Finder, then select Get Info. In the Sharing and Permissions section, click the Lock button in the bottom-right corner and type in your username and password.


You can use a third-party app to write to an NTFS disk on a Mac. Or, if you bought an external hard drive from Seagate, it should come with Paragon Driver to let you read and write data interchangeably on Windows and Mac without formatting the drive. There are two separate versions listed on the Seagate site, one for macOS 10.10 to 10.15, and another for the Macs running an Apple silicon chip.


In the Sharing & Permissions section, change Read & Write to Read only for each category you wish to change. This will prevent unwanted users or groups from deleting, adding, or changing files on the drive.


Performance: Transfer speed is the feature that most people notice on a daily basis. We evaluated each drive with tests that replicated different real-world uses, and we focused on the drives that consistently outperformed the other contenders. Drives that did well on some tests but failed others were too unreliable to recommend. We outline our testing procedure below.


Going by our initial research and criteria, we settled on nine external desktop hard drives and five portable models to test. We first tested them using the benchmarking program HD Tune. For a more real-world measurement, we then timed the transfer of a 15 GB Blu-ray movie and a 31 GB folder of music. We performed each test six times, and we determined the average read and write speeds to rule out performance hiccups. After comparing results for each drive, we took the top performers and timed their backups on a 2019 MacBook Pro using Time Machine.


Once we finished testing, we sifted through hundreds of Amazon reviews for our finalists. We eliminated drives for which 5% or more of the total reviews were only one-star ratings, because that many complaints was disproportionate to what we saw for most drives. Although you can find negative reviews for every drive complaining about an unexpected failure or incompatibility with a computer, we selected models that kept such reviews to a minimum.


Assessing negative customer reviews has its shortcomings. For one, people are more likely to post a review when they have a problem. Also, because of the limited information available in some reviews, it can be hard to differentiate between hardware failures and software issues or user errors that could cause problems with a drive. Looking at the proportion of reviews, rather than the totals, helped us account for that. But all the drives shared the same basic complaints no matter which one we looked at: All had reports of failure spanning anywhere from day one to a few years in. Still, we used the information in owner reviews to the best of our ability to weed out drives that seemed especially unreliable.


In our real-world transfer tests, the Toshiba Canvio Flex consistently performed faster than the other portable drives we tested. All the drives in our test group were rated for the latest, USB 3.2 Gen 2 transfer speeds, so in many cases the differences were negligible. But each of the portable drives other than the Canvio Flex had at least one major shortcoming in our testing: The Toshiba Canvio Gaming (4 TB) failed to perform three of our initial benchmark tests in a row, the LaCie Mobile Drive (5 TB) took nearly 10 times as long on both the large- and small-file read tests, and the Seagate Backup Plus Slim (2 TB) took roughly five times as long as the others on the small-file write test.


The Seagate Expansion drive performed fine in our large-file transfer tests but had the slowest speeds of any desktop drive we tested in our small-file transfer tests. It also disconnected itself from our PC without warning in the midst of testing and failed to connect again afterward.


The Seagate Backup Plus Slim was our previous portable hard drive pick, but we bumped it in favor of the Toshiba Canvio Flex because the Seagate model is more expensive per terabyte, its warranty is shorter, and it offers only up to 2 TB of space.


Summary: This post offers solutions to the problem of Seagate external hard drive not showing up or being recognized on Mac. It also shows you steps to make a Seagate hard drive recovery with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac. 2ff7e9595c


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