Backup Plus and Seagate Slim

[amathisen]

I have the backup plus harddrive for PC and Mac. My main computer is a mac so i installed the dashboard software it told me to install for the mac. The software has the option for save and share but the option for 'backup' is missing. What did I do wrong? How do I get the backup funtion to work? there is no option for it in the settings...

[AlanM]

The Dashboard software for MacOS does not have a backup functionality.

Seagate recommends you use Apple Time Machine for backing up your drive. 

Also, when you set up the Backup Plus drive in the Mac, you'll see the choice to set it up as Mac only or as Mac+PC.

If you choose Mac+PC, Time Machine will not work. You would need to backup data to the drive manually, by dragging and dropping or copying and pasting.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

[amathisen]

If I use the Backup Plus as my time machine, will i still be able to use it with a PC?

[AlanM]

OK, I am pretty sure you can do that.

Here is how.

1) Backup all the data from the drive. We will be erasing it soon.

2) Connect the drive to your Mac.

3) Reformat it using Mac Disk Utility.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/faq/220151en#mac

4) Once it is reformatted, it should be good to go with Time Machine.

5) Safely eject it from the Mac.

6) Connect it to the PC.

7) Download this driver to the PC:

http://www.seagate.com/support/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/backup-plus-mac/backup-plus...

8) Run it and install it according to the instructions.

9) I think you may have to reboot your computer.

Then you should be able to drag and drop and copy and paste data to the drive when you're on the PC.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/faq/206419en

You won't be able to use any Seagate backup software. I suppose it's possible a third-party software might be able to backup data to it in Windows; I'm not sure.

Let me know whether that doesn't work. Thanks!