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Switching to Mac

arthwollipot said:
Actually, I don't have a genuine Apple store - I have several resellers, one of which sells exclusively Apple products. That's the one I'm planning on going to. I'll have to ring them and see if they'll transfer my library over. The rest of stuff I don't care about, but it'd be a shame to have to re-buy all my music.
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I guess you could also consider asking to borrow an external hard drive or ethernet cable to do it yourself - if you're planning on spending a lot of money with them, it's not a lot to ask. Depending how you feel about it, you could also consider buying one and then returning it as "not working" ;) (Not that I would ever consider doing such a thing of course)


Otherwise, transferring across a wireless network should be nice and easy and could be left to run overnight. Never thought of this option (I own several large capacity external hard drives so I guess it's a case of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!!)
 
Also, I know you're already splurging on an expensive new toy - but the common wisdom nowadays is that you most commonly need an external hard drive for backups.

In an ideal world I'd recommend at least double the capacity of your system drive. Then you could enable the built-in Time Machine, which is nice and automatic (just plug in the backup drive once in a while). 1TB drives can be had for relatively cheap these days.
 
ThatSoundAgain said:
Also, I know you're already splurging on an expensive new toy - but the common wisdom nowadays is that you most commonly need an external hard drive for backups.

In an ideal world I'd recommend at least double the capacity of your system drive. Then you could enable the built-in Time Machine, which is nice and automatic (just plug in the backup drive once in a while). 1TB drives can be had for relatively cheap these days.
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Yes, I am planning this as a future update. We do have a 1Tb storage unit in our household, but apparently it's incompatible with Macs. Not too sure what that's all about - one particular cynic in the household firmly believes that such devices have 'Mac-cripplers' built in to the firmware which ensure that the device can never function with a Mac. But I guess we'll find out.
 
arthwollipot said:
Yes, I am planning this as a future update. We do have a 1Tb storage unit in our household, but apparently it's incompatible with Macs. Not too sure what that's all about - one particular cynic in the household firmly believes that such devices have 'Mac-cripplers' built in to the firmware which ensure that the device can never function with a Mac. But I guess we'll find out.
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This is not about "Mac vs PC". The compatibility problem arises from the NTFS formatting of the drive and Microsoft's reticence to publish details concerning that format. The result is that, when they are locally attached, although data can easily be read from the drive, writing to the drive is not as reliable without a bit of guess work. This gives the Windows OS privileged access to such drives.

There are several ways the drive can still be used by a Mac. Both Windows and Mac OS are fully interoperable on standard networks as servers and clients. This is not at all difficult to set up on your Windows machine, but it does require a bit of planning and attention to detail to get the desired result.

There is also software that allows other OSs to attach an NTFS volume locally as a virtual file system. Specifically, there is a commercial product called "NTFS for Mac OS X". It is a convenient implementation of the open source NTFS for Mac OS X project which is in turn based on NTFS-3G and FUSE.
 
leonAzul said:
This is not about "Mac vs PC". The compatibility problem arises from the NTFS formatting of the drive and Microsoft's reticence to publish details concerning that format. The result is that, when they are locally attached, although data can easily be read from the drive, writing to the drive is not as reliable without a bit of guess work. This gives the Windows OS privileged access to such drives.

There are several ways the drive can still be used by a Mac. Both Windows and Mac OS are fully interoperable on standard networks as servers and clients. This is not at all difficult to set up on your Windows machine, but it does require a bit of planning and attention to detail to get the desired result.

There is also software that allows other OSs to attach an NTFS volume locally as a virtual file system. Specifically, there is a commercial product called "NTFS for Mac OS X". It is a convenient implementation of the open source NTFS for Mac OS X project which is in turn based on NTFS-3G and FUSE.
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Okay, I have no idea what you just said there, but I got the message that all hope is not lost for using my existing external storage device. Thanks! :p
 
arthwollipot said:
Yes, I am planning this as a future update. We do have a 1Tb storage unit in our household, but apparently it's incompatible with Macs. Not too sure what that's all about - one particular cynic in the household firmly believes that such devices have 'Mac-cripplers' built in to the firmware which ensure that the device can never function with a Mac. But I guess we'll find out.
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leonAzul lost me too, but when I spoke to Apple, they told me that it didn't matter what kind of external storage device I bought--it would work on my Mac with Time Machine.
 
Emet said:
leonAzul lost me too, but when I spoke to Apple, they told me that it didn't matter what kind of external storage device I bought--it would work on my Mac with Time Machine.
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...if you reformat it to OS X's native filesystem or leave the drive formatted in an outmoded format (fat32, etc.) yes.

If like Arth, you already have data on it in NTFS, you'll need to either have the connection to this drive via understood network protocols (SAMBA, NFS, etc.) or copy the data off and reformat.
 
Ducky said:
...if you reformat it to OS X's native filesystem or leave the drive formatted in an outmoded format (fat32, etc.) yes.

If like Arth, you already have data on it in NTFS, you'll need to either have the connection to this drive via understood network protocols (SAMBA, NFS, etc.) or copy the data off and reformat.
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Exactly right. The problem remains, though - there's no modern interoperable file format, at least out of the box. Were Arth to reformat his drive to the Mac file system, he would have to go through hoops to get it to work on Windows.

Third-party extensions exist for either OS, but which one is the most reliable I don't know.

What I would do with a 1TB drive in stead would be copying the data onto the new Mac which would have space, hopefully. Then, after verifying its integrity, I'd reformat the external drive fifty-fifty Mac/Windows*. 500GB would be a good Time Machine size if you're selective. Depending on how much data you yourself generate, naturally, and what your storage needs are for the Win machine.

*(In fact, one of my current drives has three partitions, Mac / Win / DOS. They both understand the DOS (FAT) partition, which makes it good for exchange between the two).
 
The priority is for the Buffalo to remain as it is. Whatever tweaking is going on is going to go on at my end.

And seriously, how hard can it be?
 
arthwollipot said:
The priority is for the Buffalo to remain as it is. Whatever tweaking is going on is going to go on at my end.

And seriously, how hard can it be?
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Not hard at all, just as long as you understand that it isn't so simple as plugging it in and pushing a button.

You'll need to set up your PC as a file server with at least one folder on "Buffalo" shared with full read/write permission for the Mac client.

My suggestion is that it would be most reliable and easiest to create a sparseimage file large enough to store your backups in that folder with "Disk Utility". When you mount it in the Mac via the network, you can then designate it as your Time Machine backup disk. From then on, every time you are on the network and attach that disk it will be available for Time Machine.
 
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leonAzul said:
You'll need to set up your PC as a file server with at least one folder on "Buffalo" shared with full read/write permission for the Mac client.
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Huh?

leonAzul said:
My suggestion is that it would be most reliable and easiest to create a sparseimage file large enough to store your backups in that folder with "Disk Utility".
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Sorry, what?

This is the level of ignorance we're talking about here. :) Yes, I worked for 15 years in IT Support, but that was all application stuff. I know jack about networks, but damn if I can't make Microsoft Word sing and dance!
 
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arthwollipot said:
This is the level of ignorance we're talking about here. :) Yes, I worked for 15 years in IT Support, but that was all application stuff. I know jack about networks, but damn if I can't make Microsoft Word sing and dance!
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No worries. This is just an opportunity to expand your knowledge. :D IIRC, you are running Win 7, and it is a heck of a lot easier to set up and run an easy-to-use and secure local network with that than it ever was. There's a wizard for that. There's plenty of documentation in the help system, references and tutorials at Microsoft's site, and quite a few helpful people right here.

Meanwhile, you just want to give a little thought to whom you want to grant access to what. You probably want your family and any guests to be able to enjoy your music and videos; you probably want your Mac to be able to do that and be able to read and write to a back up file; you probably don't want everyone else on the internet to be able to mess with your address book, your passwords, or your financial information.
 
arthwollipot said:
Nope, my laptop is Vista. That's a big reason I want to get rid of it. :D
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Sorry, that's a detail I somehow overlooked. Your ultimate intention is to replace a Vista laptop with an Apple MBP. Connecting the two is just a means to an end. Do I get it now?

In that case, setting up a so-called ad hoc WiFi connection between the two is dead simple -- there are built in routines for that on both machines. For ~$20, the virtual NTFS software for Mac OS X I mentioned above will work to use your current external drive directly with the Mac until you can get a second one -- something you'll want to do anyway just for the sake of redundancy.

I'm not sure that Time Machine will recognize a virtual drive, but it will recognize an HFS+ formatted drive from an image file. A drive image file is just a document written to look like a physical drive to the operating system. The standard format for Mac OS X image files has the name extension ".dmg". The name extension ".sparseimage" refers to a file that starts out small and expands in size as more is written to it, unlike most formats which take up somewhat more hard drive space than their stated capacity whether they contain anything or are just empty space.

There's more than one goal for backing up. Something like Time Machine, which automatically maintains incremental backups, is excellent for restoring damaged or accidentally deleted files or entire folder structures. If you need to restore an entire drive, however, it takes a long time while it compares the different versions of each and every file and folder before it decides which one to write. For that purpose, something like "Carbon Copy Cloner" (CCC), which you can use to make an identical copy of your current drive either to an image file or to a duplicate physical drive, is much more useful. What I prefer about CCC is that it is easily set up to do both. YMMV.
 
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