from mac how to format hard disk for both mac and windows

Or, as per comment, you can use exFat instead of NTFS.Ĭreate a sparsebundle disk image. There are a 3 main steps to using an NTFS or other non-HFS+ drive for Time Machine:

This is how TM works with a networked drive it creates a sparsebundle on the network drive, and then mounts it. Time Machine can work on 'foreign' drives fine by using a sparsebundle disk image. Yes, you can use a single NTFS disk for both Windows and Mac backups.

My external 1 TB drive, which I use for backing up my Mac and my wife's Windows PC, has two partitions called 'Time Machine' and 'BACKUP_WINDOWS': Replace BACKUP_WINDOWS with the NTFS partition name. To prevent the NTFS partition from being mounted every time you connect the drive into your Mac add this entry to /etc/fstab (as explained here): LABEL=BACKUP_WINDOWS none fusefs_txantfs noauto When you're done, plug the drive again into every Mac/Windows computer and select the corresponding partition as backup drive (see here for OS X and here for Windows). Eject the drive and plug it into your Windows computer.Leave the other partition as 'Free Space'. Format the first partition as HFS+ (and give it a name like 'Time Machine'). Select the drive and select the Partition tab.Open Disk Utility (in Applications/Utilities).I'd recommend that you create the HFS+ partition on your Mac first, then, on your Windows computer, format the other partition to NTFS: You can use one NTFS partition to store backups of multiple Windows computers.) (Why only one NTFS partition although you back up 3 Windows computers? Because Windows stores backups in folders named after the computer name so there are no conflicts whatsoever (see this post). In this case, two partitions will suffice, one HFS+ and one NTFS.

Using partitioning you can trick your computer into thinking it is connected to more than one drive, although there's only one. Luckily, you don't need two separate drives.

In the Format menu for the partition that will be used for backups. Make sure 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' is selected If you want to partition the disk, click the Partition tab and Manually preparing a new disk for Time Machine Your preferred setup is not possible: OS X can't share an NTFS disk with Windows for backup because Time Machine needs HFS+ (from ):

From mac how to format hard disk for both mac and windows