I have a 2003 i mac OSX Version 10.4.11 with thousands of songs and pictures that I want to back up to save or transfer. The flash drives and external hard drives I have looked at all say they only work on OSX version 5+. What is the best way to save my music and photos?
iMac (Flat Panel 2003), Mac OS X (10.4.11)
I'm not sure why a flash drive would say 10.5 and up for the Mac OS. I have three, one bought in January 2012, and they work on all our Macs with USB ports going back to a G3 minitower from 1998 running 10.3.9 to which I added a USB expansion card. Works the same on that relic as it does on our newest iMac quad-core i7
Virtually all flash drives come formatted for Windows. You can leave that formatting to have a cross-platform device if needed or, if you never plan to use it on anything but a Mac, you can use Disk Utility in your Applications folder to reformat as Mac Extended (Journaled), which is how your iMacs hard drive is likely formatted
It is possible the drives come with bundled software that has system requirements. You don't need the software. The drives will work without it and there's usually better Mac utilities.
On the Windows formatting side of things, I haven't bought a flash drive in a year or so but last time I did they came formatted DOS FAT32 which is a Windows format that works with Macs too. There is a Windows format (NTFS) that only work with Windows but even then a drive can be re-formatted to Mac.
http://www.macsales.com/ sells plenty of Firewire hard drives you can use. Even if it is Firewire 800, they can sell you an 800 to 400 Firewire cable that allows your iMac to transfer your files over much more quickly than USB. Ideally get a case that supports both USB & Firewire, as you may end up getting a Mac with only USB.
i store my stuff on an old ipod.
What flash drive will work with OSX version 10.4.11
