Treat the 2 uses differently.
How to set up seagate external hard drive on Macbook pro, Mac mini, Mac laptop, apple computer This process will work with all: Seagate backup plus, Slim, C. Select “Change plan settings” Select “Change advanced power settings” Expand the Hard Disks in this window; The setting “Turn off hard disk after” should be set to “Never” while running any SeaTools for Windows test. 3.) Select the Drives to Test. Seagate, Samsung, LaCie, and Maxtor drive models are all supported drives.
A) you do not need to use any drivers for the disk. You can format the disk for Mac use with the Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility.
B) to backup your Mac for the upgrade, format the drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) disk drive. This will NOT be readable by Windows, but you can reformat for that task after you upgrade.
Use a Mac backup utility to copy your Mac's data to the external disk. Disk Utility -> Restore can be used to copy your entire system to the external disk, just specify the external disk as the destination for the Restore.
Or you can use SuperDuper (free for a full clone, you only pay if you want the incremental and scheduling features). I think there are older versions available for 10.5
Or Carbon Copy Cloner (free 1 month fully enabled demo). I think there are older versions available for 10.5
C) After you have performed your upgrade and your data is safe, you can choose to blow away the contents of the external disk and reformat it as a Windows exFAT drive that can be read by both Mac and Windows. NOTE: Some Mac file attributes may not transfer, but that would only matter if you were trying to use the exFAT formatted drive as a Mac backup device. But as a file transfer device or a device for storing documents, pictures, movies (data, not programs), then exFAT is OK for that.
If you want to transfer data to Windows first, then just create the exFAT first, transfer your data, then reformat for Mac backup and upgrade.
NOTE: you should be able to use file sharing between the Mac and the Windows system for transferring files.
I have 2 Seagate Slim external hard drives, a 1 TB and a 2 TB. After having trouble having the MacBook Pro (2013) running Sierra 10.12.3, I downloaded the driver off of the Seagate site. Now the computer can recognize and open the drive. I formatted both drives using disk utility. All well and good except Time Machine does not work on either drive. It works on my very old (2008) 360GB Seagate external drive though. Time Machine tells me it cannot find or use the drive as the need to be formatted, yet both were. So, now all I can do is copy and paste from the computer to the drive instead of Time Machine. Any ideas how to get Time Machine to work?
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), macOS Sierra (10.12.2)
Seagate For Mac Windows Driver
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