Is it possible to use an external hard drive on both a Mac and PC, switching between them, to transfer files? I'm asking because I had what feels like a lucky escape: after shifting some files over and plugging the drive back into my PC, all hell broke loose.
Chris Hamilton
Both PCs and Macs can read external hard drives formatted using the FAT file system so this should not be a problem. However, Macs tends to add files that are hidden from Mac users but visible to PC users, such as .DS_Store and .Trash folders, so it's not ideal. BlueHarvest can deal with this stuff but few people bother.
Also, FAT is not very robust and you might consider using something like NTFS-3G and MacFuse so you can convert the external drive to NTFS.
But it depends how conservative you are about preserving your data. I have both Macs and PCs and I am extremely cranky, so I'd never share an external hard drive, unless it was networked file sharing. I use USB memory sticks to move files because these are easily reformatted and/or binned without risking any loss of data.
