Please keep them in the comments as replies to others looking for help. Submitting learning resources as their own posts is not allowed. For more straightforward/trivia type questions, check out our friends at /r/Answers! IWantToLearn is meant to help people who are looking for help starting a major project or learning a new skill. Tell our community what you want to learn, and let those who came before you help guide you towards success! Well, that's what /r/IWantToLearn is all about! Have you had difficulty figuring out where to start, what path to take or just wanted some advice to get you to the next level? Have you ever wanted to learn a martial art, or to play the guitar, or how to program a computer? If you’re really interested have a look at the book “Modern Operating Systems” by Andrew S.Although repeat/duplicate requests are explicitly allowed or even encouraged, why not search our subreddit for previously given advice before making a post of your own? If you’re interested in this I can recommend the wikipedia articles. Backup, backup and backup!įootnote for the technical smart-ass: Why is FAT less secure than others? In short words: HFS+ and NTFS keep track of the changes you make and can recover if an error occurs. But make sure you’re not deleting important data. Here you can set the disk name and the file system. To reformat a disk select it and click the erase tab. In your Applications folder there is a Folder “Utilities” and here you find a App called “Disk Utility”.

So you wonder how to reformat a disk? Quite easy: exFAT is very similar to FAT but allows larger file sizes and larger disks (and some other stuff). Unfortunately exFAT is only supported on Mac OS 10.6.5 and later. If you use your stick also on Windows machines running XP SP2, Vista SP1 or Windows 7 you can use the very new file system exFAT. And it is also much saver in terms of data loss (see footnote). If you use your USB-stick only on Macs you will want to reformat it to HFS+ which allows (virtually) unlimited file sizes, longer file names and some Mac specific things. So maybe you would like to change the file system on your stick to something more modern.

you can easily lose your data (see footnote).

you can’t put any files larger than 4GB on a FAT disk.

There is also NTFS, (Windows default / does not work on Mac) and there is HFS+ which is the default for Mac OS X.įAT is by far the oldest file system and has some weaknesses: Yet you might know that there are different types of disk formats. By default all USB-Sticks are formatted as FAT (MS-DOS default) so they work on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you’re not a nerd you probably just used it out of the box. Quit possible that you own a USB-Stick (or USB-Hard-Drive) that is 4GB or larger (8GB seems to be standard now,right?).

How to reformat mac laptop