Ok I tried the network option and let me share my experience for the
benefit of others who may be in the same situation.

I reformatted the external HD to HFS (very easy in mac) and created
folders to mirror folders that contain my critical data. I also
created the same folders in my iMac. I shared these folders thru SMB
(so they can be accessed by my Windows based laptop.) Voila! I can now
see the folders in the iMac.

Problem started when I started copying files from PC to Mac. (PC thru
wifi, mac thru ethernet, 1 linksys router.) For some odd reason, the
router throttles or cuts the connection whenever I'm copying because
after 5 minutes of copying I suddenly lose connection and regain it
once unplug/plug the router.

Is this a known issue? What's causing this

On Jul 21, 10:55*am, Gizzo wrote:
Can I partition the drive so that those that I primarily use in the
mac, ie videos, music, photos are formatted in HFS and those I
primarily use in the PC, ie docs, pst files are formatted in NTFS. I
will lose the ability of cross platform access but I can have my
computers do specialized tasks: mac for media. pc for work. Has
someone tried this before? What are the pros and cons? Thanks

On Jul 21, 6:12*am, Bill Todd wrote:

Gizzo wrote:

...

1. format it in fat32. access from PC and Mac thru USB/Firewire. Pro:
easy.

Another pro is that you needn't leave it connected much of the time,
thus both reducing potential exposure to corruption by errant or
malicious software and allowing you to keep it physically separate from
the primary material that you're backing up.

Con: performance issues?

Probably not serious ones (though you might want to defragment it once
in a while if performance deteriorates over time - depends on how you're
using it): *while USB 2 can't stream data to/from a contemporary drive
as fast as the drive can handle it (typically 40 - 80 MB/sec), it should
be able to handle around 30 MB/sec.

2. format it in HFS. install macdrive in PC. access thru USB/Fireware..
Pro: whatever benefits of formating with HFS (I'm not very familiar
since I'm a mac newbie and initial research indicates there are
inherent benefits as there are with NTFS over Fat32.

Exactly which of these do you think would be significant to your planned
use of this drive?

* Con: I have no

experience with HFS nor Macdrive to judge their reliability. and $50
on Macdrive.
3. no need to reformat or repartition. Share the drive using native
network tools in both PC and Mac. Pros: no reformating. Con: I don't
know how to do it in a home environment of 1 pc, 1 mac and 1 wireless
router.

If you're using wireless don't plan on getting too much bandwidth
through it from the machine to which the backup drive isn't connected
directly. *For that matter, even wired Ethernet would be the main
bottleneck unless it was Gigabit.

- bill