Formating Hardrive for Win and Mac Use?

Greetings!

I need a way of transfering large Lightroom Catalogs from my Windows Based Lightroom to an Imac running Lightroom. Lightroom does not support accessing the Library remotely.

I have a 5 TB external Seagate I want to dedicate to this. Also acting like a back-up of all my photography.

I think I read EXFAT is cross platform?

  1. Any drawbacks, performance etc on windows if I format that way?
  2. What is the best software to format exfat on? For best compatibility.

Thanks!

Max

NTFS will perform better then EXFAT on windows. I think slowdowns are primarily with file access speed and small files, but large files are about the same.

Either the Windows or Mac built-in formatting tools will work fine.

The drawbacks to exFAT is that it is FAT.

So expect: heavy fragmentation if data is ever moved, and data corruption for long term storage, and file permissions being severely limited.

For an intermediary filesystem to just chuck temporary data back and forth it should be alright but if you plan to use this in other other capacity then you will want more robust options like NTFS or a NAS.

Edit: just read you want to use this as a backup for you photo’s. Don’t do it on exFAT or you will loose your shit randomly.

You can use Unix file systems on both which also allows the +4gb files that fat can’t do and w/o the shit of exfat

And it’s not too hard to get jfs+ read/write on windos

A better solution would be a NAS. It would work with ALL OS’s. Also, depending on the NAS, you could do a RAID setup, which would provide redundancy. I personally have a 4bay Qnap unit, but Synology also has some good NAS’s from what I have heard.

I would go NAS, But good ol Adobe lightroom can not use files on a network:-(

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But it has to be LR for your photos? Maybe it would be a good time to leave Adobe behind?

Reason I use a Mac Pro hooked up to my San to allow windows share, bdr hosting, smb and network drives it makes it a bit easier but also a big cost I use the machine tho if it was a stand alone network drive location it would be a bit harder or near hell
Adobe is getting annoying with pro tools… I do this cause re learning is going to hurt on my speed I Know the product too well it’s gonna take a long time to get back up to speed switching

And my huge backup of donated powermac files

I have like 1tb of programs and installers
400gb or backed up iTunes music from bought power macs
It’s getting hard to remove myself from the ecosystem

Unfortunately, I have 250k images in Lightroom.

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If you have a Mac mini/Pro get a fiber/thunderbolt/usb3.2 San where you host with windows share on

I will check if this has changed, but for what ever reason, Lightroom cannot access files on a network.

I just need to be able to have my current (back-up) of all my photos and the library which holds all the non destructive edits, So I can plug into an Imac and work, or show client, but also be able to go back to Windows and keep synced.

I’ve already had a big problem getting my main LR catalog library to transfer from a Win 7 computer to a new win 10 3700x.

The library needs to see the file structure or you get 250k images as MISSING do you want to locate them:-(

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