Macs also support FAT32 drives, marked as FAT in Disk Utility. If you really have to share the drive between Mac and Windows machines, that's your best option though. The main issue with exFAT is that your drive will be more prone to fragmentation when used with Apple devices and is less stable than NTFS on Windows. This choice is more appropriate for USB flash drives, although you can still use it for SDD and HDD units too. Yet, you won't get top performance on either. In general, all external drives formatted to HFS+ work nicely with older Mac versions but are incompatible with Windows.ĭesigned by Microsoft, the exFAT is a good choice if you plan to use the external hard drive with both macOS and Windows systems. If you have an older Mac, though, choosing the HFS+ is your best bet. This type of file system is suitable to use with both HDD and SDD drives, but the latter will perform slightly better with the APFS mentioned above.
The HFS+, or Hierarchical File System plus on its real name, was the main file system used for Mac until 2017. However, you won't be able to use this system with Time Machine. The biggest strength of this system is the speed, as well as the encryption and metadata handling. This is the best format to pick if you have an external SSD or USB flash drive that you don't intend to use with a Windows device. However, it still works with traditional HDD drives too. Nowadays, all new Macs come with the operating system preinstalled on APFS, as this system is optimized for use with SSD and flash storage drives. The APFS was first introduced in 2017 as a replacement for the HFS+. To understand which is the best for you, let's have a comprehensive overview of each of them. The first step to formatting your external drive for a Mac computer is choosing the right format. Part 1: What Is the Best Format for External Hard Drive Mac?
If you already backup your Mac with Mac backup software like Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Time Machine, iCloud photos you moved to Mac will be backed up as well. Once you transfer iCloud photos to computer, you can also move them to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, box etc.
You can check our previous guide on how to download photos from iCloud to Mac/PC computer to make a local backup for iCloud photos. Step 3: Click Download Originals to this Mac and transfer iCloud photos to Mac. Step 2: Head to Photos > Preference, then click iCloud and sign in to iCloud with your Apple ID.
Follow these steps to access iCloud photos and copy them to Mac. To backup iCloud photo library to computer, you need to download these photos to your Mac/PC first. How to Backup iCloud Pictures to Mac/Windows Computers