Deborah, if you plan to use drive for Quicken Backup only, the drive needs no special formatting. It’s data can go on any drive. What is important is if you are using a PC you use a PC formatted drive, but if you are using a Mac you should use a pre-formatted for Mac drive, it will make your life easier.
Reformatting a Western Digital My Passport hard drive to function well on Windows and Macintosh systems is neither time-consuming nor technologically demanding. Back up all important information on the drive before beginning; any data left on the drive will be destroyed during the reformatting process.
![Mac Mac](https://discourse-cdn-sjc1.com/wd/uploads/default/optimized/3X/f/a/fa5b29f75df968b044eb8c5bf65a760ce21c0581_1_690x371.png)
WD sells both types. If you have not yet embarked on this project, consider this: The price of hard drives has really come down since you got the one you have. You can get a new one with twice the capacity at around half the price today. For a PC, you can find a nice portable drive of 1TB capacity on sale for around $60-70. A Mac HD version will cost more, because manufacturers know Mac users are used to paying more for computer stuff (seriously!). Also, you likely do not need to erase everything on your current HD to make room for the Quicken backup. You likely need to remove a few gigabytes of data to make room for Quicken data so you can use your present drive without a massive erasing procedure.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125493277/302104224.png)
Hi there, JoeySmyth, just wanted to let you know that I first tried to delete the data that was on the WD My Passport. It was very stubborn and I resorted to formatting the drive.
I set it up for my Quicken backups and so far have had no problems. I was using a 7.5 GB thumb drive for the backups and it was full(!). I keep tax return copies and the Quicken backups because I’m such a nervous Nellie I was using the 200 GB Passport for all other backups until I bought a 3 TB My Book because now I have so much stuff! I want to thank you and Mike27Oct, for answering my questions and making me feel welcome to the forum.
Good for you, Deb. (You can just call me Mike; the second part of my username is my b-day as you may have guessed – it’s to differentiate me from all the other Mike’s in the world!
And there are a variety of reasons a drive can be stubborn to allow deletion of certain files and folders, many of which would just likely bore you anyway to hear about them. Glad we made you feel welcome here. Being nice goes a long way. Joey and I are regulars here, and we usually get things more right than wrong, although Joey does like to jab me with a “gotcha” once in a while if I got it wrong. Powered by, best viewed with JavaScript enabled.
How to Recover Data From Formatted WD My Passport July 17, 2015 There are certain situations when photographers need to connect their single external hard drive to multiple operating systems. Most of the times, professional photographers need to do this as they usually store their photo collection in external drive. On the other hand, a particulate type of operating system follows a single file format to store data in an internal or external hard drive. For example, if we talk about Windows users, then the file system should be NTFS, similarly with Mac owners it should be HFS. Usually, both the formats are not compatible with each other, therefore when it comes to external hard drive, the user cannot use one storage drive on both the platforms. But this time, Western digital has introduced a range of portable hard drives named ', which are designed for both Mac and Windows systems. These are shipped in preformatted or in the NTFS (Windows) or HFS+ (Mac) format.
In order to use the same drive on both the platforms, you need to format or reformat it using exFAT or FAT32 (DOS) format. You have not take Backup before Formaating? You formatted your hard disk and afterwards you discover that you need some important data which were present in your Hard Disk. If you have a data backup in some other location then it is fine but if you have missed out your routine backup plan and suffered from data loss then recovery software is the only solution to retrieve back data from your formatted hard drive.
In Case of Mac System: Download to recover back data from your formatted hard drive. Step 1 Connect your external hard disk to Mac OS X system Step 2 Select the Stellar Mac data recovery icon to launch the software Step 3 Click on the Start Scan button and go to the menu Step 4 Here, select your external hard drive. You will see a list of methods available. Select the desired recovery option and click on the ‘Start Scan' option to proceed. Step 5 After scanning the formatted external hard drive, it lists out all the files that can be recovered. You can select the needed files and select recover to recover back all the files.
In Case of Windows System: Download to recover data from your formatted Hard Drive. Step 1: Run the software Step 2: Under the ‘Data Recovery Tab, click on Drive Recovery. The formatted drive will be listed under ‘Drive Recovery‘. If it is not showing up then try to connect it externally using SATA/USB connector or directly into the motherboard. Step 3: Next, click on the formatted drive partition to select it. Once selected, you will get to see all data recovery options on the right hand side of the screen. Select the ‘Advanced Recovery’ and the suitable file system.
(NTFS or FAT) If you are looking for the lost or deleted hard drive partition, select the option ‘Select Hard Drive to Search Lost Volumes ‘under the same ‘Drive Recovery’ tab. Step 4: You will be able to see the scanning process in the next step and all the missing or deleted files on the screen. Once scanning process is complete, a list of deleted files and folders is displayed on the screen. For recovery, you need to click on the check box to select the files for recovery. Step 5 After you click on the recover option, all the selected images will be recovered to the desired location.