How to transfer updatable Mac files to a PC

In short, back up the entire mac hard drive to a readable bootable backup partition created by the program SuperDuper on an external USB hard drive. (It's what I have available. You may also be able to do this through a network drive as well.) Unlike Time Machine, SuperDuper backups allow users to read individual files from the backup using any computer that can read HFS+ partitions. Expect it to takes ~3 hours to backup ~260GB.

Then install MacDrive on the PC. This trialware allows Windows to read and write to Mac's HFS+ partitions. When my Mac backup is finished, you can eject the external backup disk, connect the external backup disk to my windows machine, and MacDrive will allow you to read all of my files. Granted, I have to find all my files in their folders first.

I wonder if MacDrive will allow indexing on HFS+ drives to easily find files. A music and picture program can probably search the drive and add the files by reading them off of your external hard drive, or locally copy them to your Windows hard drive. You can probably edit the settings in the programs to behave as you'd like.

Possible issues: MacDrive and SuperDuper are not free. I haven't tested copying a SuperDuper backup to a laptop hard drive as the primary OS yet. Not competely sure what to do about Bootcamp partitions. (I'd guess you could safely create a seperate partition for the bootcamp partition and restore it to a different partition you made as well. You may have to reactivate it though due to the hardware change (if there is one).


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While I like my unibody macbook 2.4 Ghz with 4 GB ram, 320 GB hard drive at 7200 RPM and GeForce 9400m video card, the core i5 and i7 processors were a bit of a draw. I would still get applications not responding and slower than desirable load times for applications. So I thought about making a hackbook out of a core i5 notebook. But I got greedy and decided to go for a dedicated video card. I bought a 14" Dell Studio with the i5-520 processor, 512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD4530 video card (which doesn't seem compatable with hackintosh software yet... boo), 6 GB or ram, Dell wireless N, Bluetooth, baacklit keyboard, slot loading DVD-RW drive, and SRS Premium Sound. Basically, the hardware is better or equal to than the macbook in every way. It does have a Boston Red Sox logo built into the top case... but I picked it up for less than $800. Used 13" unibody MacBook with core 2 duos are selling for between $600 and $1050 on eBay, usually around $850-$950. The lid is what hurts the resale value though.

Anyway, I had to come up with a way to get my 300GB of files on my macbook (well 100 GB of pics and original movies and about 50 GB of documents.... the rest being media and application files I believe) available to my Windows computer. If it was only a few key files, a flash drive would work. However, since flash drives are formatted in FAT32, they supposedly can't store single files larger than 1 GB. Fat32 is readable on both Mac (HFS+) and Windows (NTFS). Mac may be able to read from Windows Disks, but may have trouble writing to them. Things are changing though. If you use bootcamp or parallels, you may be able to get around it. If you wanted to copy files from your mac to a drive readable by Windows, you could have a NTFS formatted external hard drive and copy files from your mac drive (HFS+) with parallels open since parallels lets you read (maybe write) from HFS and write to NTFS.

However when you use a drive like this, you can not update it easily.

My solution was to use superduper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) to make a BOOTABLE BACKUP COPY of the entire Mac hard drive. Unlike time machine it makes backups bootable from USB ports. So after you make a bootable backup to a USB drive, you can turn on ANY macbook you want... maybe even a hackbook..., hold the "option" key while booting, and the backup will be one of the available hard drives to boot from. Superduper will also allow you to read (maybe write) files from the backup when it is attached as an external hard drive- unlike time machine which has everything indexed/ encrypted.

I need to figure this out a little better, but I think the superduper backup is seperate from the time machine backup. I had 360GB allocated for a time machine backup. I was using about 250GB for the existing time machine backups. I had about 110GB left for what I thought was going to be SuperDuper's small supplement to the time machine backup. But after nearly 2 hours, it said the backup disk was full. So I formatted the 360GB backup (removing my time machine backup) and did a superduper "backup all files" from my primary macbook drive (leaving out my Windows bootcamp because I didn't know how to do both drives and the files on it weren't important). SuperDuper created a backup that was not time machine compatible, but was compatible with superduper continuous backup. I am curious how to get the superduper backup onto a new laptop hard drive. It looks like the superduper interface allows you to copy the disk drive you saved your backup to to another disk drive. So if you had a mac with a blank hard drive you wanted to restore/ copy your superduper backup to, you would boot the computer with the external hard drive with the superduper backup on it and hold the "option" key. Then you would boot from the superduper backup drive instead of the blank laptop drive. Then you would open the superduper interface and copy (maybe after formatting the laptop drive) the superduper backup to the laptop hard drive. Even if that doesn't work, you can still get all your files because the backups are readable.

A superduper backup of about 270ish GB of info on a 320GB 7200RPM drive took about 3 hours and ten minutes when using the USB 2.0 onto an older PATA 7200rpm 500GB external hard drive.

So for my strategy of getting readable and updatable macbook files onto a windows hard drive is to use Superduper to create the readable and updatable backup of the entire macbook drive. If I ever want to update files, restore my hard drive to a different macbook I get in the future, I can do it. On the Windows machine I'll install MacDrive 8. (http://torrentz.com/7d2cab682fa30a5816f945092640e62b754bd2a9). MacDrive is a program that allows Windows computers to both read and write to Mac's HFS+ disks. From what I've read, HFS+ disks are better than NTFS because they do not have to be defragmented. Linux also has a stable ext3 disk format, but since it is uncommon, you will have to download application files to read and write from it on both mac and Windows. I partition my external hard drive with at least 30% more space than my current usage since I'd like the option to update the superduper image in the future while maintaining the full operating system. I create another partition on the external hard drive and since I plan on copying large files here and leaving them off the main backup. I create the separate partition using Mac's disk utility. I can choose to make it FAT32 (bad for large files), NTFS (probably OK... but you may need to download a special NTFS writer driver or be in parallels or boot camp to write to it from a Mac. It will be easy for Windows to read the files without MacDrive, which is nice. However, it may need to have the disk defragmenter run on it eventually. You would create the NTFS partition by using Mac's disk utility to create any type of formatted drive. Then you would connect the hard drive to a Windows machine and right click on "computer", click on "manage", then "Storage", then "disk management". From there you could reformat the drive to NTFS by formatting it- erasing all the data- and coding the drive to be read in the NTFS style naturally compatible with Windows.
Another idea is to format it as HFS+ and rely on MacDrive on your Windows machine to allow you to read and write from this partition. MacDrive is not free though. The HFS+ partition will be easily readable and writable from any mac. I'm going with this option since I have macdrive installed. There is a 5 day free trial period.