I did a thorough search of the forums and did not find a situation like mine, so I am hoping somebody can help me. After a hard drive of mine failed and I spent lots of $$ and time recovering my data, I am now going to play it a little safer.

I have two identical Western Digital 1TB external/portable HDs. I have reformatted both to FAT32. Would it be possible for me to set these up together as a Raid1 (mirrored raid), but be able to plug into both my Mac and PC (using them with both computers) and make changes from either? If so, how would I go about doing this? Some sort of enclosure? I need to be able to access my raid(ed) HDs from both my machines because I am not wanting to store data on either of the computers internal HDs and I use both computers equally (one for work, and one for personal use).

If anyone could provide me some insight to any of these questions, that would be greatly appreciated. I am pretty tech-savy, but not a genius, so if possible try to not speak in too complicated of terms lol. Thank you!

Friends don't let friends use FAT32 for storage. FAT32 is way more likely to crap out when you don't "eject" drive properly. Mix it together with a RAID, and you've got a formula for not fun.
FAT32 is more prone to disk errors and fragmentation.

Points for going with the mirrored RAID, though. As much I get a lot of work from people who opt for gigantic RAID 0's with nothing but 10GB of photos on them, you're safer sacrificing space for having a backup.

You'd almost be better off buying an empty working 2TB NAS enclosure and inserting your disks. Then you get the XFS,ZFS,Ext3,ReiserFs etc. Then you can use either PC and MAC.

Now you've got your data, plus your data in one box. If one disk dies, you've got your mirror which you can access with UFS explorer.

You have a few options.

For a quick and easy USB method you can install acronis to perform you (mirror to the drives on a schedule)
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pr ... index.html
(as far as USB Mirror raids - i havent seen anything that i trust)

Leave your drive as NTFS and download the MAC NTFS 3g software (works great for reading and writing files)
http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

I believe its $15 after your trial expires but well worth it.

You could alternatively share the primary drive over a network, leave it as NTFS and go from there.

I hope that helps.

Hard drives are cheap. Data recovery is not.

I suggest that you buy separate HDs (RAID 1) for your Mac and PC. Format the PC raid with NTFS. Format the Mac with HFS+. Reasoning: If you have minor issues with your hard drive(s), it is easier to find and use specific repair software with these separate formats.

Also, Time Machine will back up your Mac automatically & reliably. Too bad Microsoft hasn't come up with an easy-to-use program for back-up and restore, that will produce a bootable result.

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Acronis typically tends to offer pretty good stuff, even though it is typically not professional level stuff.



This is definitely sage advice.

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Nationwide data recovery services for RAID servers and laptops - http://www.harddriverecovery.org/

I think that you should look at a different set of drives than WD. If you do some searching here WD is not the best drive in the entire world and has problems.

Like others say do not keep it in FAT leave it in NTFS you are better off.

Jono has a great solution for this but I know time machine is great and my daughter uses it all the time and has never had any problems at all with it. She loves it and has excellent results with this one.

NAS or Lacie will do for your RAID enclosure and you can use these disk but if you do make sure that you still keep backups of them on other disks in another location. People say 2 but normally I make 4 for me. At times I also have 6 backups at the sametime. Yes it can be time consuming but would rather spend a little time than loose all the data. Reason for 6 is that there is one drive for each computer backing up and then moving them around so that all is back up on them at the sametime.

They also have online backup. Never used it and do not know if this one would work or not so can not advise on this one. I know some companies here on the islands that use this and they have had no problems with it. You can send the data in a drive to them and they can load this up for the first time from what they said to me on this one. After you can upload all your changes to make it faster. Might check into this one but like I said I have never used it at all.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Personally I do not trust automated backup softwares. I prefer the old fashion way of copy/paste so I know what is hapenning with my backups. It needs to babysit, but better safe than sorry.

I agree with above options that it is better to use different set of drives for your PC and your MAC. Better buy two NAS boxes and get done with it.

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SandForce SSD Recovery
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I agree wtih you Northwind I do the old copy and paste and baby sit the backups for me. I do each system on each one of the back up drives and have special folders for each one of them. I do not do an automatic back up of my drives either.

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Iorana Haraharaini