Figured I'd just post this because it was a daunting task for me and I'm sure it might be for others...
I decided to move from a Mac to a PC. But the problem is that I had around 11TB of files on an Apple APFS formatted drive (actually one drive and two backups) that I needed to somehow get formatted to NTFS for Windows.
Initially I tried using the "MacDrive" software on my new Windows computer to access my Mac drive and transfer the files onto an NTFS drive. This was a mistake. It doesn't work well enough for big amounts of data transfer. It repeatedly crapped out after every couple hundred GB of data transfer. So don't bother with this.
What I ultimately ended up doing is transferring all my files off of the APFS drive to a drive I formatted with exFAT using the Mac. It's not a great file system, but pretty much the only one that Mac and Windows can both read and write to. It seemed like it worked best if I formatted the drive to exFAT using the Mac. Either way, just be sure both machines can read it no problem before you spend time copying all your data onto it. Then once I had everything on an exFAT drive, I transferred everything from that to an NTFS drive using Windows. For any backups, you could then copy the NTFS drive onto another NTFS drive in Windows.
The software "FreeFileSync" was very valuable for all of that because it makes it easy to make sure everything gets copied from one drive to another, and even check again after it's done to be sure. And they make it for both Windows and Mac.
So there you go... exFAT is your friend for doing this kind of thing. Don't bother with the MacDrive software for Windows.
I decided to move from a Mac to a PC. But the problem is that I had around 11TB of files on an Apple APFS formatted drive (actually one drive and two backups) that I needed to somehow get formatted to NTFS for Windows.
Initially I tried using the "MacDrive" software on my new Windows computer to access my Mac drive and transfer the files onto an NTFS drive. This was a mistake. It doesn't work well enough for big amounts of data transfer. It repeatedly crapped out after every couple hundred GB of data transfer. So don't bother with this.
What I ultimately ended up doing is transferring all my files off of the APFS drive to a drive I formatted with exFAT using the Mac. It's not a great file system, but pretty much the only one that Mac and Windows can both read and write to. It seemed like it worked best if I formatted the drive to exFAT using the Mac. Either way, just be sure both machines can read it no problem before you spend time copying all your data onto it. Then once I had everything on an exFAT drive, I transferred everything from that to an NTFS drive using Windows. For any backups, you could then copy the NTFS drive onto another NTFS drive in Windows.
The software "FreeFileSync" was very valuable for all of that because it makes it easy to make sure everything gets copied from one drive to another, and even check again after it's done to be sure. And they make it for both Windows and Mac.
So there you go... exFAT is your friend for doing this kind of thing. Don't bother with the MacDrive software for Windows.
