I have an Airport Time Capsule backing up my MacBook Air. The MacBook's memory is totally full and I need to transfer my pics elsewhere. So I plan to connect a WD MyBook 4TB hard drive to the Time Capsule and dump my photos there. Unfortunately, the MyBook drive is not recognized by my MacBook Air. Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Do I need formatting software for the Western Digital drive? Thanks.
Chances are that your WD My Book drive came formatted in NTFS which is common for Windows devices. Macs can read data on these drives, but cannot write to them natively, without using a third-party solution.
Mac's typically use HFS+ (& recently APFS) file formatting for drives. Your WD My Book will work best with the Time Capsule if you formatted for HFS+. You can do this with macOS's Disk Utility with the drive attached to your MacBook Air.
Chances are that your WD My Book drive came formatted in NTFS which is common for Windows devices. Macs can read data on these drives, but cannot write to them natively, without using a third-party solution.
Mac's typically use HFS+ (& recently APFS) file formatting for drives. Your WD My Book will work best with the Time Capsule if you formatted for HFS+. You can do this with macOS's Disk Utility with the drive attached to your MacBook Air.
You must connect the WD drive directly to your MacBook for the process. Once the formatting process has completed......then.....you can connect the WD drive to the USB port on the Time Capsule.
The Mac HFS+ format that Tesserax mentions is also known as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
The reason for this is that Disk Utility on your Mac cannot "see" the drive at all when it is connected to the Time Capsule. So, it would not be possible for Disk Utility to format the WD drive while it is connected to the Time Capsule.
The example below from Disk Utility shows a WD drive connected to my Mac that is named WD500GB that will be formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) when I click the Erase button.
GUID is recommended.
I just prepared Disk Utility to Erase and Format with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and noticed another option. A third selection appeared called Scheme. Scheme offers three choices:
GUID Partition Map
Master Boot Record
Apple Partition Map
Do you know which choice is best? I assume the Apple Partition Map would best allow the My Book to talk to my MacBook through my Time Capsule, but I don't understand exactly what Scheme is or does. Thanks again for your advice.
Would I plug the WD drive directly into the MacBook for this process, or will it work if I plug it into the Time Capsule? This question feels silly to ask, but I want to be thorough. Thanks.
Thanks again. Here goes.
How to format a WD My Book for Airport Time Capsule?
