Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨‍💻? Find out how to check here.

Forum Discussion

MajorHavoc's avatar
MajorHavoc
Collaborator | Level 9
3 years ago
Solved

Backing up an NTSF drive attached to a Mac

I recently retired a Windows 10 machine that had a 12 TB NTSF drive of pictures, videos, and music attached that is 75% full. That drive was backed up to Dropbox on the Windows machine. I bought NTFS...
desktop
Dropbox Backup
Mac
sync
windows
  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    3 years ago

    Hi MajorHavoc, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

     

    Currently, the supported file systems that are supported on Mac OS for Dropbox Backup are HFS+, APFS, exFAT, and FAT32. 

     

    There isn't any official workaround for these supported file systems, so if another user does provide one here, we would recommend caution when using it.

     

    If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

KVNTaylor's avatar
KVNTaylor
New member | Level 2
4 months ago

It's a long story. Microsoft holds the patent for NTFS (New Technology File System). Due to technical reasons, macOS doesn’t fully support writing to NTFS-formatted hard drives. Additionally, Windows does not recognize drives in Mac-specific formats, such as APFS and HFS+.

If you'd like, you can use third-party tools like iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, Mounty, and other apps that allow macOS to interact with NTFS drives, enabling you to write to them, create new files, copy or cut files, download files to them, and more.

Alternatively, you could reformat the backup hard drive to exFAT, which is fully supported on both Mac computers and Windows PCs.

About Create, upload, and share

Find help to solve issues with creating, uploading, and sharing files and folders in Dropbox. Get support and advice from the Dropbox Community.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!