I'm trying to transfer around 300 GB of files from my Mac to my Windows system using an external hard drive. I've copied the files over and safely ejected the drive before plugging it into my Windows PC. I checked a few files, and they seem to work fine. However, I'm worried about the potential risks of data loss or quality issues during this process. Before I delete the files from my Mac to free up space, I want to confirm that I won't encounter any problems after this transfer.
5 Answers
Just a heads up, you might lose some metadata during the transfer between different file system formats like APFS to NTFS. Also, without journaling or indexing your backup, there's no easy way to check if files are missing or altered. For future backups, consider the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two different types of media, with one kept offsite.
Files themselves don't degrade during copying. Just remember, any storage can fail, so having a backup is your best protection against losing data.
You should keep the files on your external drive as a backup, just in case. Or, you could store them on a thumb drive as an alternative. If you need to save space, creating an image of the drive is another option.
Typically, you shouldn't face any problems with transferring files this way. To be completely sure everything transferred correctly, you could do a checksum comparison between the original and copied files, but that's probably more than you need. If you copied the files without any errors, you should be all set!
As long as your external drive is formatted properly, which seems to be the case here, going back and forth between devices should be fine. If it's formatted to exFAT, you should not have any issues moving files.
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