How can I share an external hard drive between a Mac and a PC?

Solution 1:

Format HFS+, use as time machine. On your Windows system, install non-free MacDrive and you can read it. http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

We do this here for some of the drives that arrive to us from external vendors that are all in HFS format (and some windows people need to read it).

Or, you can just share it from your Mac over your home LAN (not exactly that useful, but..)

Solution 2:

I use NTFS-3G for the Mac and formatted the drive NTFS. This allows me to use it on both Windows and Mac and easily move between these machines.

You can use FAT32 but it does have a file size limitation of just under 4GB (2³²−1 bytes).

Solution 3:

Formatting as FAT32 will let both your PC and your Mac read from and write to the disk. If you plan to directly connect the disk to your Mac, Time Machine will only work on it if it's formatted as an HFS+ volume (which Windows can't read without installing some third-party HFS+ driver software).

Solution 4:

You can format it with FAT32. Although i am not 100% sure, I think you cannot use a share drive as a Time Machine target disk and still put files on there from Windows.