Forum Discussion

Luminary

Jun 21, 2016

Solved

Mount ReadyNAS Backup on a Mac

I have an RN202 running OS 6.5. I want to back up the NAS content to an external HDD and understand that the external HDD must be formatted in the same btrfs format as the internal drives. It is my...

Backup

External HDD

Using with Mac OSX

StephenB
Jun 23, 2016
I don't recommend FAT32, since it has filesize limitations that often get in the way.

There are third-party packages for NTFS and EXT on Mac that are quite inexpensive (Paragon offers both).

The mac could be booted up using a linux boot disk, and then you could access EXT (and perhaps BTRFS).

JennC

NETGEAR Employee Retired

Jun 23, 2016

Hello dschwartzer,

USB drives you can use with the ReadyNAS should have BTRFS, EXT2/3, FAT32 or NTFS format. I think Mac can read FAT32, but I'm not 100% sure, I suggest you check on a small USB stick by formatting it to FAT32 using Windows then plug it to your Mac and see if that will be read. If not then, there must be a 3rd party software you can use to make Mac read any of the file system formats you can use.

Let's see if other community members have something to share about this.

Regards,

StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Jun 23, 2016
I don't recommend FAT32, since it has filesize limitations that often get in the way.

There are third-party packages for NTFS and EXT on Mac that are quite inexpensive (Paragon offers both).

The mac could be booted up using a linux boot disk, and then you could access EXT (and perhaps BTRFS).
- dschwartzer
  Luminary
  Jun 23, 2016
  StephenB:
  
  I agree that FAT32 has file size limitations. In addition, FAT32 does not like all of the special characters that you can use in the HFS+ file naming convension. The first time I tried to back up to a FAT32 disk, a large number of files were skipped and error messages were generated.
  
  I did look at the Paragon product and at $20 is certainly cheap enough. There is also an Open Source option OSXFuse which looks promising. Both support NTFS and EXT but neither supports BTRFS. I will check both of them out.
  
  That said, I looked at the ReadyNAS backup function again and see that the external USD drive does not get formatted in BTRFS (my error), so the EXT2,3,4 driver mentioned above should work. I still won't be able to read the drives that are in the RN202 in the event of a hardware failure, but as long as I can get to the data on the back-up USB drive, I could always copy it back at a later date, so I think this solves my problem.
  
  Thanks for your help.
  
  Regards,
  
  David