Copying files to External HD: Long long time

[AngeloLeon]

To All,
A backup of a Macintosh user profile performed a few months ago, there was a time machine backup and a regular copy/paste to an external apple formatted external HD. The latter is not seen in Windows 10, makes sense. Another external hard drive formatted in FAT32 and started a copy/paste from the Mac to that windows format external HD - it is taking forever to copy. We purchased a BeyondCompare and still taking weeks to copy data to the externa HD.
Would there be another quicker way to copy the Mac laptop files to the Windows formatted external HD?
The client does not a Macintosh computer available on his side, and a cloud option backup may not be an option.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

How much data are you copying?
What size is the external disk?

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

Another external hard drive formatted in FAT32 and started a copy/paste from the Mac to that windows format external HD - it is taking forever to copy.

I could be wrong but for speed I thought that the format should be ExFat, as my screen shot.

Another external hard drive formatted in FAT32 and started a copy/paste from the Mac to that windows format external HD - it is taking forever to copy. We purchased a BeyondCompare and still taking weeks to copy data to the externa HD.

Also I would favour drag and drop.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

As oldscrbe says 'Ex-Fat' would be a better bet

 

[oldscribe]

Hi Lufbrarunner &AngeloLeon,

Personally I stay as far away form MS as I possibly can, but have many friends who have to use MS machines for work. And they do tend to use EXFAT as a preference for interchanging files, so that was what prompted me to join in the thread hope you did not mind.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

The more the merrier
I have 1 windows machine that I use rarely and keep a couple of USB drives to interchange some files. When I first started they were formatted as FAT and the copying time was very slow i.e a couple of hours for 32gb of data, they are now formatted to Ex-Fat and the transfer times are much quicker.

 

[Harry Trent]

FAT32 has a maximum partition size of 2 TB and a maximum file size of 4 gb. ExFAT does not have these limitations.

Also, file transfer speed is greatly affected by the generation of the computer's USB ports and of the external storage drives involved as well as the quality of the flash drive. What generation Mac are we talking about here? USB 2.0? USB 3.0? USB 3.1? USB 3.2c? In addition, cheap flash drives are made with slow memory controllers and slow chips.