Getting files off of old beige G5 power mac.

Question

Getting files off of old beige G5 power mac.

I Have an old beige G5 Powermac (3.0), 2 GHz) that I used as the main computer for my graphic art studio years ago. There are a large amount of files on this machine that I would like to put on a external hard drive for later use. This hard drive would have to be able to connect to a pc laptop as well. Does anyone know of a easy way to do this? Or a recommended hard drive to get? The G5 is running OS X (10.4.11) and can no longer access Onedrive or ICloud anymore. Too outdated. Anyone?

PowerMac G5, Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Posted on Feb 6, 2016 9:33 AM

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Answer 1

ChitlinsCC

Level 7

20,924 points

Feb 6, 2016 10:31 AM in response to Kelley Jarvis

Fix your Web browsing experience with TenFourFox: A fork of Mozilla Firefox ESR 38 for the Power Macintosh and Mac OS X Tiger PowerPC = VERY cool on my PB Pismo G3 (loves RAM though)

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Answer 2

ChitlinsCC

Level 7

20,924 points

Feb 6, 2016 10:36 AM in response to Kelley Jarvis

Once you get your data on the cloud (there are many FREE ones... DropBox, Amazon, Google. etc.that you could split up your files if necessary), you probably want to network your external drive rather than plug it directly into X-platform computers.

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Answer 3

Limnos

Level 10

411,109 points

Feb 7, 2016 8:36 AM in response to Kelley Jarvis

Pretty much any drive with USB will likely work with both in terms of hardware issues. The issue is working with Macs and PCs and it is a problem with any generation computer. Macs can only read NTFS (PC) formatted drives, not write to them, not without special software. PCs cannot read or write Mac formatted drives without special software. Both can read/write to FAT formatted drive but there are individual file size limits (4GB for FAT32) and I don't know if I would want to use a FAT formatted drive for more than temporary transfer. You don't say if this is for long-term use or just for transferring, nor how many files. You may find a decent size flash drive which usually comes FAT formatted may be enough for file transfer.

By the way, a "beige" was only a G3 model.

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Answer 4

Feb 7, 2016 8:48 AM in response to Limnos

If there is any problem connecting a modern external hard disk to the computer I would suggest using File Sharing to transfer the files from the PowerMac to the present Mac, and then transfer then to a suitable hard drive from that (in batches, not all at once!). File Sharing should work fine in Tiger - this page explains how to set it up:

http://rfwilmut.net/notes/sharing.html

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