Problem moving files to WD EasyStore portable HDD

[paulri]

I have used a 2 tb WD hard drive for my on site backups. There is plenty of free storage, so I told my daughter using a macbook air to move some files there also (her storage is over 95% full). Her macbook air will see the drive when it is physically connected via USB cable to her laptop, and double clicking will show the contents of the portable drive. But we cannot seem to move files from her computer onto this drive. The box of the portable hdd does say "Mac" on it. Different file system?

Is there something that we can do to resolve this? I absolutely do not want to reformat it, b/c that would destroy all the files already there. My laptop (and my wife's desktop) both run windows, and there has never been a problem saving or copying before--I know the backup hdd itself is good.

 

[OVERKILL]

If you go to the properties of the drive, what does it show for file system?

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

Sounds like the USB drive is formatted as NTFS which a Mac can recognize and I think read but not write to which fits your situation.

 

[paulri]

Yes, I just checked. It is NTFS.

So that's the issue.

And to change this, we would have to reformat the entire drive?

OK looks like the quickest approach is simply to copy onto a thumb drive, then attach that usb thumb drive to my laptop, and have my laptop copy the files onto this portable drive. Is that going to be the quickest easiest approach here?

 

[JohnnyG]

Does the destination drive have a partition that IOs will recognize?
I'm not an apple fanboy, but most drives need to have a valid partition to move files into. If apple devices don't see that you'll need to create one and format it to something that it does see.

 

[OVERKILL]

Yes, I just checked. It is NTFS.

So that's the issue.

And to change this, we would have to reformat the entire drive?

OK looks like the quickest approach is simply to copy onto a thumb drive, then attach that usb thumb drive to my laptop, and have my laptop copy the files onto this portable drive. Is that going to be the quickest easiest approach here?

Yes, that'll work. Alternatively, you could share it on the network and copy the files over the network onto it.

 

[paulri]

Just thought of something---can my Windows 10 laptop see & copy files from a thumb drive that has been formatted to work with a macbook?

Another alternate is that I do have Acronis True Image 2021, so perhaps I can use it to back up these files to the cloud, at least until she gets a macbook air with more storage. But it would be simpler not to use the cloud, right now. So if I can move a thumb drive from the macbook air to my W10 laptop, that would be the easiest.

 

[spackard]

Frigging filesystems and external USB drives.
Yes, I know what you want to do: ignore all security a filesystem offers, and write data.
Thing is, you should't be able to do it. You should be presented with all sorts of ownership restrictions and identity mismanagement issues.
If it was an internal HDD and you move it to another computer, in a different domain, you'll see all those restrictions.

But with an external USB HDD you aren't. I don't know how it (bypasses) works in Windows, but in RHEL7 and NTFS it does a big bypass when it mounts, and assumes you are the full owner of whatever you mount. Use it subsequently on a Windows machine and I'm not sure it'll work like you want it to work. It sure won't have proper NTFS identities on it.

I get around restrictive-permission filesystems on external disks by formatting them with a filesystem that doesn't do those, but does do decently long filenames, pathnames, and file sizes. UDF. Kind of a pain to make on WIndows, must use command-line to format. But it's widely spoken. All the other external HDD filesystems are not spoken across OSes, are copyrighted, or have serious limitations that make them unsuitable for a large external HDD used to move around a lot of data.


Try exFAT. I don't know what its limits and limitations are, but Google says it'll work for both Windows and Mac.

 

[Andrew1972]

Is her Mac used by work or her own? My Mac I own that is on a corporate VPN and has security profiles has the ability to write to USB disabled. I can only read USB only.