I backed up files onto an external hard rive form my old PC. Now I want to retrieve the files to put on my mac but it is telling me to format it to Mac. How can I do this without erasing all of the data on my hard drive?

I backed up files onto an external hard rive form my old PC. Now I want to retrieve the files to put on my mac but it is telling me to format it to Mac. How can I do this without erasing all of the data on my hard drive?

Your drive was used with a PC and formatted NTFS which is proprietary Microsoft format.
You need to install a third party program that will read the NTFS format.
There is various software from PARAGON, Tuxera and NTFS-3G
When you get the data off and have verified it to be good, reformat the drive either HFS+ for Mac use only, or for Mac and PC use then MSDOS (FAT32) for under 4GB files (best) or exFAT (for larger than 4GB files) is proprietary and Microsoft is appling for a patent, which would likely mean OS X won't be allowed to read it anymore without a licensing fee and you'l have to pay another third party software company to read the format, just like NTFS is.
The less you have to rely upon third party sources to read your drives the better, this way if you have a issue and need to read the drive on another machine you don't need the software, and a internet connection and a credit card and...and...and...

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