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Old 11-02-2012, 01:58 PM   #1
bossy22
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Default Migrating from pc to Mac

Buddy has a windows PC with and external harddrive. On the harddrive are all of his documents, pics, music, etc. the pc just contains the software. It's on it's last legs and he wants to get an iMac. What is the best way for the Mac to use the hard drive? Will I have to copy files to the new Mac, reformat the harddrive, and copy back?

Also he will be required to have parallels or something of that nature because some of his work software is windows only. So his work related docs will go on that partition, and the personal items like pics, music, etc will go on the Mac partition.

What is the best way to keep this clean? Any help is appreciated.
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Old 11-02-2012, 02:08 PM   #2
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A MAC will read the FAT32 or NTFS drive no problem. No need to move things around.

If he keeps the files on that drive he will have access to them from any OS he uses via Parallels.

In short. Get a mac and plug the drive in. Nothing more is really needed.
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Old 11-02-2012, 02:13 PM   #3
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Nm, just realized I double thanked him. Kid was up at 4 and I'm tired, so I'm dumber than usual.
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Old 11-02-2012, 02:14 PM   #4
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Macs can read NTFS, but they can't write it IIRC. So it's really not a permanent solution.

If it is an NTFS or FAT32 drive, the best option would be to copy the contents to the Mac and then reformat the drive as exFAT. That format is fully readable and writable by both operating systems and it doesn't have the 4GB file size limit that FAT32 has.
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Old 11-02-2012, 04:23 PM   #5
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Also he will be required to have parallels or something of that nature because some of his work software is windows only. So his work related docs will go on that partition, and the personal items like pics, music, etc will go on the Mac partition.
OSX will come with a copy of bootcamp, which will allow him to load windows on a separate partition. Not as handy as Parallels because you have to re-boot to get into it, but a lot more robust.
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Old 11-02-2012, 04:39 PM   #6
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If it is an NTFS or FAT32 drive, the best option would be to copy the contents to the Mac and then reformat the drive as exFAT.
That's absolutely not the best option - no large drive, and particularly an external drive that is subject to unexpected disconnects, should be running a non-journaled filesystem like FAT32.

Does buddy carry the external drive to/from work, or will it remain permanently attached to the Mac? We need to know the use case to figure out the best option.
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Old 11-02-2012, 06:05 PM   #7
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That's absolutely not the best option - no large drive, and particularly an external drive that is subject to unexpected disconnects, should be running a non-journaled filesystem like FAT32.

Does buddy carry the external drive to/from work, or will it remain permanently attached to the Mac? We need to know the use case to figure out the best option.
It stays home attached to the Mac.
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Old 11-02-2012, 06:45 PM   #8
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It stays home attached to the Mac.
And are his PC apps graphically intensive? Any CAD/3D/photoshop type apps?
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Old 11-02-2012, 09:40 PM   #9
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And are his PC apps graphically intensive? Any CAD/3D/photoshop type apps?
Nope, nothing that intensive.
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Old 11-02-2012, 10:34 PM   #10
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If he puts his data on the Mac directly he could use the external drive for time machine backups. That's one of the most awesome built in features of the Mac. Turn it on and point it at a drive and it creates hourly, daily and weekly backups ad infinitum. You can go back to any point in time and restore individual files or the whole Mac. When / if it comes time to change your Mac hardware you can fully restore the new machine or drive from Time Machine.

Plus it looks cool

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Old 11-03-2012, 10:08 AM   #11
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If he puts his data on the Mac directly he could use the external drive for time machine backups. That's one of the most awesome built in features of the Mac. Turn it on and point it at a drive and it creates hourly, daily and weekly backups ad infinitum. You can go back to any point in time and restore individual files or the whole Mac. When / if it comes time to change your Mac hardware you can fully restore the new machine or drive from Time Machine.

Plus it looks cool
That's where I'm leaning - I'd run the PC apps in VMware Fusion (or Parallels, but VMware is the better of the two imho), and what I would do is set up folder sharing with whichever virtualization product you choose, rather than copy all the work related data into the VM itself. This means the data will live in a folder on the Mac, that the VM will see as a mapped network drive (that's how VMware does it, I assume Parallels works the same way or something similar)

Why would I do it this way? Because then, when the external drive gets repurposed for Time Machine, the individual work files get saved as distinct versions each time they change. If they are inside the VM, you'll only be backing up the VM (since a VM is essentially a collection of very large files representing a physical disk), which makes recovering a previous version of a data file awkward (extremely awkward in fact).

I'd stay away from bootcamp, unless you want to game (and if you want to game, the iMac is the wrong choice regardless). For anything other than CAD or other 3D apps, the performance of virtualization is more than sufficient, and you gain all the benefits of other tools like VM snapshots, the time machine backups, etc, that you don't get with a bootcamp setup.
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Old 11-03-2012, 10:23 AM   #12
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That's where I'm leaning - I'd run the PC apps in VMware Fusion (or Parallels, but VMware is the better of the two imho), and what I would do is set up folder sharing with whichever virtualization product you choose, rather than copy all the work related data into the VM itself. This means the data will live in a folder on the Mac, that the VM will see as a mapped network drive (that's how VMware does it, I assume Parallels works the same way or something similar)

Why would I do it this way? Because then, when the external drive gets repurposed for Time Machine, the individual work files get saved as distinct versions each time they change. If they are inside the VM, you'll only be backing up the VM (since a VM is essentially a collection of very large files representing a physical disk), which makes recovering a previous version of a data file awkward (extremely awkward in fact).

I'd stay away from bootcamp, unless you want to game (and if you want to game, the iMac is the wrong choice regardless). For anything other than CAD or other 3D apps, the performance of virtualization is more than sufficient, and you gain all the benefits of other tools like VM snapshots, the time machine backups, etc, that you don't get with a bootcamp setup.

That's awesome, thanks!
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Old 11-03-2012, 04:41 PM   #13
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I'd stay away from bootcamp, unless you want to game (and if you want to game, the iMac is the wrong choice regardless).
Why's that? Just for the added features of time machine? I found half my USB drivers didn't work with parallels, making my reasoning for using window useless.
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Old 11-03-2012, 06:00 PM   #14
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Why's that? Just for the added features of time machine? I found half my USB drivers didn't work with parallels, making my reasoning for using window useless.
What kind of USB devices?
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Old 11-03-2012, 06:06 PM   #15
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It was 2 or 3 years ago so the details are a bit fuzzy, but a Motorola phone for sure. The others I don't recall.
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