Misunderstandings between external disks and computers

[denetoet]

Dear helpers,

My problem: I want to transfer important information from my computer (mac) onto a external disk (xd) and give this xd to my son so he can read the content on his computer (Wi) running Windows.

I bought a 16Gb xd and formatted it to MacOS extended (journaled). Next I transformed the important files on my Mac from .pages .docx and copied these to the xd. This was because I thought he would more easily read .docx on his computer.

My son's computer Wi however could not read the xd and continued requesting reformatting. So I think my approach was too naive. Looking to the Wi's internal hdd I discovered that its format was NTFS. So maybe the format of the xd I gave him should have been NTFS. Am I right? And if so, what would have been the right way to obtain that? And if this can be achieved, am I still right to put the .docx files onto it so that he can read those?

Hope you can help. And thanks in advance, Dirk

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Apple’s macOS can read from Windows formatted NTFS drives, but cannot write to them out of the box.
However, macOS can natively read and write to exFAT drives, just like Windows can.

 

[AutoMac]

The alternative is formatting the XD on your Mac to APFS which is much faster for file transfers than other formats (1 hr to transfer 1TB of my photos vs 5 hrs ‘offered’ with MacOS extended). The APFS format can be read on Windows machines but with the need for a freely available app.

 

[Harry Trent]

Use extended FAT for the format of the XD. Both Macs and Windows computers can read that.