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Level 1

4 points

External HD

My external HD is new. What do I have to do before I export images to it?

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 23, 2020 9:51 AM

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Level 10

116,903 points

Posted on Nov 23, 2020 10:02 AM

I always use Disk Utility to erase a new drive based on my intended usage for it, regardless of how it is formatted when I receive it:

Read/Write access by Windows, Mac, and Linux
1. Erase as FAT32, or exFAT
Read/Write access by macOS
1. Formatting per 1.1
2. Erase to HFS+ Journaled (implicitly case-insensitive) with GUID partition scheme (all versions of macOS)
3. Erase to APFS Journaled (implicitly case-insensitive) with GUID partition scheme
  1. For Mojave, Catalina, or Big Sur interoperablity

MacOS does not natively support writing to Windows NTFS, or Linux drive formats.

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