ok I don't know shit about Mac's, and this girl I know is asking me what she needs to do to back stuff up because she is leaving town for a couple of months and doesn't want to come back to find all of her work gone. She is afraid that her computer will stop working while she is gone. she has a pretty old Mac G4 cube OS-9.something, and needs to back her stuff up.

Can she use a USB flashdrive? does she need a specific kind or just plug any kind in and format it for a MAC?

If this doesn't work then what's the next best option? She doesn't have a cd-rw in her mac so she would have to buy an external one if she goes that route.

Would an external USB2.0 harddrive work? Does it have to be some MAC specific thing or can she just format any hard drive to mac format?

5/25/2006 10:48:18 PM

I was about to say that I've never had a problem with the operating system not instantly recognizing USB flashdrives or firewire/USB harddrives, HOWEVER, I've only been using OSX for the past like 3 yrs or however long it's been out.

I will say that most likely it doesn't support USB2.0 if its that old.

Backing up data is always good, however, unlike a car, I don't think 2 months of not running will have much of an impact on the machine, unless its in a non-climate controlled area or something.

-ZiP!-

5/25/2006 11:00:45 PM

If it's FAT32 the mac will read it just fine, but you can always format. Honestly, if she has a cube, the largest drive in it is 60GB but more likely she has a 30 or 40. Just back everything up to an external HDD (note that the cube has USB 1 so it might be better networking it with another machine and doing a network transfer). If she's really afraid, just find out where her data is (there's no "My Documents" folder it's whereever she decides to save her data) and backup the system folder. Everything else should (theoreticaly) be replaceable from install disks.

Quote :

"Backing up data is always good, however, unlike a car, I don't think 2 months of not running will have much of an impact on the machine, unless its in a non-climate controlled area or something. "

It wasn't a mac, but I did come back from spring break one year to find my PC couldn't find NTLDR. That was hell.

[Edited on May 25, 2006 at 11:03 PM. Reason : adsf]

5/25/2006 11:02:17 PM

thanks for the help. one of her friends came back from a trip recently and her hard drive was fucked an she has a bunch of design projects in photoshop, etc... on there. Anyway, I think I have an external hard drive that is firewire compatible, and I know she has at least 1 firewire port on it, so I will try that first.

Can anyone tell me what I am going to need to do once I hook the hard drive up? In terms of formatting it for the mac. It is currently NTFS formatted but I don't have anything I need to keep on the drive, I just need to know how to reformat it on the apple.

thanks again.

5/26/2006 12:01:27 AM