As the title says, I have an old Mac running 10.13 (High Sierra) with an 16TB external drive formatted to ExFat that serves as my main “backup” drive for every computer in my home.
Some background: I used to have a 5TB drive (formatted as HFS+) for this and everything (i.e. all the scenarios listed below that aren’t working on the new drive) worked flawlessly. But space was running low so I wanted to upgrade to a newer one. Given that my Mac is also pretty old, I wanted the new drive formatted in ExFat so when the Mac dies I could then, and only then, swap it to a newer PC.
The issues: On the Mac, I can copy the files to the new drive using Beyond Compare and my cloud backup service seems to have no problem seeing the new files and even thinks they match with the existing backup set so it doesn’t try to upload them again. This is great.
But on all my Windows machines that connect it, things started to not work with the new drive. Chrome can’t save downloads to it and gives a completely unspecified error. I can’t manually add files to the drive. Let’s say I connect to the drive and open up an existing folder. I can see files in there. But if I right-click and choose New -> Rich Text Document, Windows immediately says “Unable to create file ‘foo’. There is not enough space on the disk.” Winamp can no longer scan the folders on the new drive (I can’t find any errors). There are other oddities but these are the main ones for me. Like I said above, all of these scenarios work fine when connecting to the older HFS+ drive from my Windows machines but not the new ExFat drive. And I can do everything on the Mac with no issues (at least with Chrome downloads and creating files). I have tried connecting to the drive via \\<machine>\<driveName> and trying to share individual folders on the drive. Same results. It looks to be how the Mac is opening connections to Windows but I don’t know what the fix is, if any.
Any ideas here would be appreciated. But I’m keen on keeping the backup drive on the Mac as long as that machine is working.