Bought this GREAT Toshiba portable hard drive for my MacBook to use to store files, essentially as another drive. I wasn't interested in using it for backups but that is certainly an option.
I have an identical one for my iMac and love the idea that I can just drag and drop files in there outside of my operating system without eating up the internal memory of the machine.
I had forgotten, however, that these ship formatted for Windows 7-- with the detailed explanation "Reformating required for Mac Users". A search of the Toshiba website offers little more than that and in reading some of the reviews Mac Buyers who discover the incompatibility are sending them back for the more expense pre loaded Mac versions-- don't do it! It's actually quite simple to reformat-- ignore the person who wrote that it took him nearly 20 hours to reformat! It took less than a minute and I'm not that tech savy.
1. Plug in the Hard Drive to your USB port. Choose DECIDE LATER regarding time machine-- you can decide this for yourself after all is done.
2. Go to Finder, click on the Icon for the Toshiba and click GET INFO-- you'll see that the format listed is WINDOWS-- that's the problem-- we need to reformat.
3. Go to Disk Utility-- if you don't know where that is type it into the magnifying glass spot at the top right of your screen.
4. In Disk Utility select the Toshiba machine and you'll see the information on it. Click on ERASE-- the option which lists the FORMAT will come up-- it will say either WINDOWS or MS DOS-- change this to MAC OS Extended Case Sensitive and click Erase.
5. Choose DECIDE Later for the time machine option.
6. If there is a second Toshiba Disk listed repeat the same-- this is the sub-folder back up.
7. Go back to Finder, click on the Icon for the Toshiba and click GET INFO-- you'll see that the format listed is now MAC OS X -- you're good to go!
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