My experience migrating about 11TB of photos and vids from a Mac drive to a PC drive

[Kit Lens Jockey]

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.

 

[koenkooi]

Years ago I used Paragon NTFS for Mac to be able to transfer files larger than 8GB to Windows computers. I think the trial version worked for 30 days.

 

[kaihp]

11TB will take some time, regardless how you copy it.

One option is to connect them on a LAN (Ethernet) and use this to copy the data over. For most, this will mean a 1Gbps link, which is limited to roughly 115MB/s (sustained).
Systems with a single rotating disk (or effectively single disks, such as RAID1) can go up to 280MB/s peak, but the sustained data rate is often lower. Not so with ssds (even SATA SSDs can go at 500+ MB/s).

If this is too slow, first look at the source media. If this is single disks, you could be throttled by their sustained data rate.

Then, consider the destination media.
At last, consider if you can upgrade the network to 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps or 10Gbps. For short runs of cabling, Category 5e is good enough.

I have a measly 3TB, and transfered it from my first generation NAS to the 2nd gen NAS. As both are RAID6 type systems (raidz2 for the geeks) with 4 data disks in parallel, I was able to benefit from the 10Gbps LAN I have between them.
Still, it took a good couple of hours to transfer everything.