AFAIK, most backup drives including USB things are formatted as something like EXT3 that can be read by pretty much any OS.

The ones that say “Windows” are going to be NTFS and the Mac ones are going to be something Macs prefer.

I’ve got Macs and I have to be careful when i get external drives b/c if I reformat them without scrutinizing the format, they can’t be read on Windows, and vice versa. But as long as I leave the existing formatting intact, I usually have no trouble reading and writing files between both Win and Mac, and probably Chromebooks as well (I don’t have a Chromebook, so I’m not sure).

-David Schwartz




On Sep 2, 2023, at 10:20 AM, Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:


Very cool. My power supply, I think, for my NUC just bit the dust and I couldn't get my Windows box to read the back up USB drives. The cool thing is that my little chromebook CAN read them. So I emailed the file I wanted to work on (a libre calc file) to myself and then I opened it on the windows box. And before anyone asks I sure thought I format the drives in an M$ format. The windows box didn't ask if I wanted to format the drive.
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:-)~MIKE~(-:
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