For these of us who not often switch information bodily throughout gadgets, file-format functionality could also be a distant reminiscence. It used to occupy a whole lot of consideration. Nevertheless it nonetheless crops up everytime you’re attempting to place information on a USB thumb drive at hand off to another person. If you happen to’re each Mac customers, swell; with Mac and Home windows within the combine, you is likely to be tempted to choose FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.
However FAT32 is distinctly outdated. Designed for an earlier time, it may’t deal with information bigger than 4GB. As a substitute, choose ExFAT, its alternative (and nonetheless fairly previous), finest used on drives of 32GB or bigger capability.
Whereas first making certain you could have a replica of any knowledge on a drive you need to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, comply with these steps:
- Connect the drive to your Mac.
- Launch Disk Utility (from Purposes > Utilities > Disk Utility).
- Choose the drive within the left-hand sidebar.
- Click on Erase.
- From the Format menu, choose ExFAT.
- From the Scheme menu, choose Grasp Boot Document.
- Click on Erase and comply with prompts to substantiate.
Foundry
This Mac 911 article is in response to a query submitted by Macworld reader Robin.
We have now extra recommendation about Methods to format a drive on a Mac in a separate article.
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