Backup Problems with my Mac Mini

[PixelSmith]

Hi All,

I wonder if anyone has got any experience or enlightenment on this one: I've got an external LaCie harddrive connected to a PC through a USB2 interface;
I want to copy to that drive from a Mac Mini, but keep on getting a delayed write error message. I can't connect the drive to the Mac directly because it's formatted in NTFS which the Mac can't write to. I've been told by a friend that the problem is to do with the Mac trying to write the data too fast for the PC to handle - an answer which I'm a bit dubious about as the speed would be negotiated during the initial handshake... right?

Has anyone got any troublshooting tricks up their sleave that I could try?
Or even suggested solutions if the problem is well known about...? I'm
intriegued as to why it won't write to be honest, I'm sure there must be
logic going on at some level - I hate merely fudging things and not really
learning anything in the process.

Looking forward to your collective wisdom...

Rob

 

[LimeiBook86]

So your trying to copy files over a network to a PC external drive? I do this all the time on my PC but, only on internal drives. I've tried external and I've got similar errors but, that just may be my cheapo $6 USB card.

I was about to read and write to Windows drives on my Mac by plugging them in, you have to "Get Info" on them and change the permissions I believe, I did this successfully once, if I remember exactly how I did it I'll let you know.

Good luck!

 

[PixelSmith]

Yes, that's basically what I want to do. I may have to wipe the externals and reformat in FAT32 soI can physically connect them to the Mac, and possibly use it as the backup server instead of the PC. Don't really want to do this though - I want the Mac as the operational machine and the PC as the print, file and backup server.

Getting pretty irate about why it doesn't work! A techie would probably laugh at the naivity of what I'm trying to do - I can't help feeling that it's probably a well known issue and I'm banging my head against a brick wall

 

[ftaok]

Pixel,

Macs cannot write to NTFS volumes. It seems unlikely that they ever will since NTFS is a closed microsoft format.

It looks like you've found out what you'd have to do (i.e. format in FAT32).

Also, having the NTFS drive hooked up to the PC should work. Macs can "write" to NTFS volumes over a network. This is because the PC is doing the actual writing to the hard drive. Did you say that this method didn't work or that it wasn't as elegant as you'd prefer?

ft

 

[PixelSmith]

Hi FT,

I originally wanted infact to write to the external USB drive over the network via SMB file sharing protocol - from the Mac to the PC with the drive externally attached - but it didn't work, kept getting error messages (see my original post).

The method I used was to connect to the Mac from the Windows XP(sp2) PC and then drag from the viewed Mac folder to the external harddrive mounted on the local system. Basically - doing all the backup procedures working from the PC, so I don't need to keep switching machines.

I think there may be an issue with network copying to USB drives - not sure though to be honest and still very much looking for some answers. May have to use FAT32 instead for now and physically plug and unplug for each machine.... Why can't everything just be Mac and then it'll all work fine <<<blames Microsoft and Bill Gates