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Is a Toshiba external hard drive compatible with Time Machine?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
You don;t say what type of drive so it's impossible to say for certain but most standard connection drives, USB or FW will work wiht TM.
Just make sure you format the drive for OS X before using it, no matter what the writing on the box says.
If you want a more specific answer post back the make and model number.
regards
Thanks for responding. It's a Toshiba Canvio 3.0
Nothing on the web page jumps out so it should be fine with TM. They do however state that you need to reformat the drive if you're using it on a Mac. And of course none of the software they supply will be useful to you.
There are also a number of reviews on the Toshiba site for this drive that mention the cable being a problem. A few also mention the USB cable being non-standard. You may want to check that out before buying. A proprietary connector on the cable at the drive end would be a deal breaker for me.
regards
No it is not, it shows up on desktop but is locked. Best buy used the Canvio to back up my old macbook pro that had crashed, and I've had to take it back to Best Buy a total of 6 times to get them to successfully reformat it to be compatible with my new 17" pro so I can load the data onto this one! I would consider backing up to an Apple external hard drive from now on, or one that is sold at the apple store, as very few of Toshiba's hard drives are formatted to work with macs and you'll have to take it in to get it formatted which, in my case, did not work. Good luck!
It is unclear whether there is data there you want to recover, but if there is, you should be able to read it if it is "locked" read only.
If you just want to use the drive as a time machine backup, just reformat it yourself using disk utility:
The following talks about Aperture, but the process is the same for any disk:
Is a Toshiba external hard drive compatible with Time Machine?
