Moving PLN from Windows to Mac and back

[Jeff Kogut]

I used AC12-21 over 7 years in a Windows environment - as a background.

I have a new job and we use AC19 on Macs. I took a file home on a USB drive Friday to work on it on my Windows pc, it has AC19-21 on it. I copied the file to a \Work folder, opened it in AC19, worked a couple of hours, closed AC and saved on exit. Went to copy the file Sunday night back to the USB drive to take in to work. Could only find a filename.pln and filename.bpn with Friday time stamp as ~40kb files in c:\users\jeff\etc... file tree which were labeled as 'internet shortcut' and were garbage. The file in \Work had a Thursday time stamp.

So last night I tried a test. Took another file home and tried to recreate the issue, but couldn't. I, again, copied the file to \Work directory and opened it, wrote 'TEST' across the floor plan, saved it. I copied that file back to the USB drive and brought it in to work.

Copied that file back to the Mac desktop this morning and opened it. No 'TEST' written across plan. Yes, all layers on. This test file has a timestamp from last night at the end of my testing.


Is there something obvious, or not so obvious, that I'm doing wrong here?

Are there some basic Mac to Win and/or Win to Mac rules I don't know?

[mikas]

Probably the formatting of your usb drive, the file system. You could use fat32 (not so good anymore because of limitations), or preferably exFAT. NTFS can't be written to on a Mac, only read from. If the stick was to be formatted for Mac, a.k.a HFS+, you could not have read it at all with a PC.

There are third party extensions for Mac which do allow NTFS writes, but I do not know their status right now. There are third party programs for windows too to read HFS+ format, but I think your, and everybodys, best solution would be exFAT.

So, erase and/or format USB-drive to exFAT, and you should be ok with cross platform transfer again.

[Jeff Kogut]

Thanks Mikas, last Thursday I did format with FAT32 on the Mac to take the file home. But I've just reformatted with exFAT and will try again.

[mikas]

You're welcome. Hopefully it works.

If You do these transfers regularly, you might want to try DropBox or some other alternative cloud service. I work at home and at the office every week. I use DropBox, but I am experimenting with Apples iCloud too. MS OneDrive or any general purpose cloud service with filesync should do the trick too.

[mikas]

One more thing came to my mind. You might want to try a finder level copy too, when you are at it. You could make a folder and just drag the files in MacOS finder to that very same USB drive. That way we could troubleshoot more at once.