Backup with different drive formatting on network

[accacc57]

Please be patient as I am new and trying to figure this all out.

At my company the designers (3) use Macs and everyone else uses Windows. We have a Lacie rack mounted 1TB drive that the designers share over a windows network. This drive says it's formatted as NTFS whereas I believe Macs drives are usually HFS. The person set this up knows less about computers than me, but now it's part of my job.

My problem is that I need to backup this drive. I currently back it up just by copying the files (drag and drop) from the rack mounted Lacie to another Lacie Big Disk Extreme+ Dual that I have connected to my Mac computer. But we have thousands of files and I need to automate this process and make it very reliable. The thing that I am unsure of is the formatting and finding a backup program that works across the network. If Mac uses HFS, how can we save and edit our files on a NTFS formatted drive? Is it because it is over the Windows network? When I back this up, should I attach a drive directly to the rack-mounted Lacie and use the software included on the drive (which is Windows XP)? In which case should I format the new drive as NTFS? I don't know how the Lacie Big Disk Extreme+ Dual that I have attached to my computer is formatted, I'm sure it is however it was shipped. The amazing thing is that this all works.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I should do to try to straighten this out? Or is all of this different formatting not a problem at all? Please help.

 

[foshizzle]

If You're going over the network using windows protocols (SMB) then formatting absolutely does not matter. If you plug the big disk into the rack mounted unit and the big disk is formatted for a mac (HFS) then the rack unit will not be able to write to it or recognize it because of the formatting. However, if the big disk is formatted NTFS or FATxx (can check this in disk utility on your mac) then you will be able to write to it directly plugged into the rack unit (which would be the optimum/fastest way). However, it is unlikely that the big disk is formatted NTFS if you plug it into your mac because your mac can only read NTFS, I do not believe you can write to NTFS from a mac. Check the formatting then go from there. If you can backup the big disk somewhere else temporarily then format it NTFS then drag all the files back onto it, then you'd be able to plug it into the rack unit directly.

I'm not familiar with the software you can install for backing up, but at work we have a Netgear readyNAS rack mounted and the OS on the NAS has a builtin backup utility that we can set to backup to a USB hard drive. Check the network setup of the rackmounted unit to see what you can do.