RELATED: What's the Best Way to Back Up My Computer? How to Format a USB Drive as exFAT on Windowsįirst, plug the USB drive that you’d like to format as a universal Mac/Windows drive into your Windows machine. If the USB drive is formatted as a Windows drive, it’s probably best to back it up with a Windows Machine. If the USB drive is formatted with the Mac file system, you’ll need to use a Mac to transfer the data off of the drive.

Formatting a drive always erases all of the data on the drive. If the USB drive that you want to use as a universal transfer drive contains any data that you want to keep, you’ll need to back up that data onto another disk or a cloud backup service first. RELATED: Why Does Windows Want to Format My Mac Drives? Before You Get Started: Back Up the USB Drive First This disk preparation setup process is called “ formatting.” Below, we’ll show you how to set up a USB drive as exFAT for both Windows and Mac. That file system is called exFAT, and it’s designed for flash media cross-platform compatibility. If you’re frequently using both Macs and PCs with the same drive, the ideal solution is to configure a USB drive with a file system that both operating systems can read.

And likewise, if you format a USB drive as NTFS on Windows, Macs can read it but not write to it (although there are some ways around it). So here’s the problem: If you format a USB drive as APFS on a Mac, Windows 10 won’t read it without third-party tools (and will actually ask to format it).

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