Deborah, if you plan to use drive for Quicken Backup only, the drive needs no special formatting. It’s data can go on any drive. What is important is if you are using a PC you use a PC formatted drive, but if you are using a Mac you should use a pre-formatted for Mac drive, it will make your life easier. WD sells both types. If you have not yet embarked on this project, consider this: The price of hard drives has really come down since you got the one you have. You can get a new one with twice the capacity at around half the price today.
For a PC, you can find a nice portable drive of 1TB capacity on sale for around $60-70. A Mac HD version will cost more, because manufacturers know Mac users are used to paying more for computer stuff (seriously!). Also, you likely do not need to erase everything on your current HD to make room for the Quicken backup.
Discussions.apple.com Question: Q: WD My Passport Ultra 1TB Reformating -Does the Security protection on the Drive still work after reformatting I am considering buying the WD My Passport Ultra 1Tb to back up all of my music, photos and files but am struggling to choose between the WD My Passport Ultra 1Tb or the WD My Passport for Mac.
You likely need to remove a few gigabytes of data to make room for Quicken data so you can use your present drive without a massive erasing procedure. Hi there, JoeySmyth, just wanted to let you know that I first tried to delete the data that was on the WD My Passport. It was very stubborn and I resorted to formatting the drive. I set it up for my Quicken backups and so far have had no problems. I was using a 7.5 GB thumb drive for the backups and it was full(!).
I keep tax return copies and the Quicken backups because I’m such a nervous Nellie I was using the 200 GB Passport for all other backups until I bought a 3 TB My Book because now I have so much stuff! I want to thank you and Mike27Oct, for answering my questions and making me feel welcome to the forum. Good for you, Deb.
(You can just call me Mike; the second part of my username is my b-day as you may have guessed – it’s to differentiate me from all the other Mike’s in the world! And there are a variety of reasons a drive can be stubborn to allow deletion of certain files and folders, many of which would just likely bore you anyway to hear about them. Glad we made you feel welcome here. Being nice goes a long way. Joey and I are regulars here, and we usually get things more right than wrong, although Joey does like to jab me with a “gotcha” once in a while if I got it wrong. Powered by, best viewed with JavaScript enabled.