Resolved Partition external backup drive as exFAT?

[n8mac]

I have a Mac Pro 5,1 with several drives that include El Capitan and Win7 in bootcamp. I am trying to setup an external 2TB drive as a backup drive for all my drives. I have already formatted this external drive as HFS and have some video files on it. Now I need to setup time machine on the drive as well as partition it to backup the windows NTFS drives too.

I can't make an NTFS partition in MacOS, so I went to the windows side and it won't let me shrink and partition the drive without formatting the whole thing, which I can't do as I already have video files on there. The only option I see is creating an exFAT partition in MacOS to backup my windows drives and then setup time machine for the rest.

I have read that exFAT is unreliable compared to NTFS. Is this the way to go or is there another option? Id prefer not to buy any software.

Thanks

 

[Significant1]

Can't you just create the exfat partition in macos and then go to Windows and reformat that partition as NTFS.

Ntfs is journaled, while exfat is not. But both macos and windows can write to exfat.

 

[crjackson2134]

Unless things have changed in the last year or so, I discourage the use of exFAT. I’ve been in the exact same position as the OP regarding video files and 4GB+ files. I went down the same road, and learned the hard way that exFAT isn’t reliable switching between OS’s.

I never found an acceptable solution for myself, but other people are formatting to NTFS and using Paragon NTFS for macOS to access the drive. Personally I won’t do that as I don’t have great confidence in the 3rd party FS driver performance. Some find it acceptable for their use. It might be worth your consideration.

 

[n8mac]

Can't you just create the exfat partition in macos and then go to Windows and reformat that partition as NTFS.

Ntfs is journaled, while exfat is not. But both macos and windows can write to exfat.

Yes this worked fine, thanks. Not sure why i didnt think of this lol. Now i have both macos and windows on automatic backups across all drives.

@crjackson2134, i dont really have a need to share files between the two systems as the windows side is mostly just for gaming. I will keep that in mind if this ever changes though.