Question for mac converts

Right now I have 2 computers running windows 7 and several different external hard drives where I store all sorts of things, particularly photos of course.

I was wondering... if I bought a mac, how would it affect my backup/storage plan ? I'm asking this because of the different file format obviously. Would I need to buy another larger drive to temporarily transfer everything I have in the other drives, format them to the mac format and tranfer everything back to it's proper place ?

Macs can natively read and write to FAT partitions and they can read from NTSF partitions. Installation of a freeware app pair, MacFuse and NTFS-3g allows writing to NTFS partitions. However, if you are able to get your drives initialized as OS X volumes then that would be better. In terms of backup, Macs come with Time Machine software that does incremental backups each hour for the first 24 hours, then keeps dailies after that until your hard drive is full. At that point it starts deleting the oldest backups to make room for the newest backups. This volume should also be initialized for OS X, IMO.

I know about time machine but I would prefer to do it manually. Are those softwares reliable ?
Let me rephrase my question. Imagine you're a windows user and you have several ntfs external hard drives with data. You buy a mac and want to continue to read and write from those drives. What would you do ?

Use something to get OSX to be able to read / write to those externals and get a separate drive for TimeMachine. (which is automatic, foolproof and allows you to do a quick system restore should you ever need it).

Exclude your image files from the TM backup and backup those manually (or however you wish to do that)

Have a look here: http://www.thedigitalp​lumber.co.uk …ge_magazine_art​icles.html
(More useful articles in the older years as well)

René, why do you want to exclude the image files from the TM backup?

Because that way I can use a smaller TM drive, TM works faster (since less is changed on the HDD) and I backup the images manually anyway upon import. (and after editing)

I submit that if your various drives are full enough that you don't have enough space to shuffle data around to rebuild your filesytems with HFS+journalling, you probably need to add more space or move to larger drives. Maybe pick up a 3TB disk for < US$200 and use that for backups.

Note that Time Machine likely requires a Mac-type filesystem.

@René: ah right, for practical reasons then. Okay, thanks.

I see. Unfortunately I think the most practical ( although far from actually practical ) route is Anthony's one. Buying a larger drive to copy everything, format the ones I have now and then transfer everything back. I'll investigate journaling.

Davidoff wrote in post #13339231
I see. Unfortunately I think the most practical ( although far from actually practical ) route is Anthony's one. Buying a larger drive to copy everything, format the ones I have now and then transfer everything back. I'll investigate journaling.

Unfortunately this would be significantly more expensive today than it was a month ago, due to the flooding in Thailand.

That said, disks are still dirt cheap compared to how they used to be.

You might also want to look at Carbon Copy Cloner it's free and I use it to do scheduled backup of my working drive to my main backup and from the main backup to the secondary backup. http://www.bombich.com​/