Sims 4 Mac & PC: External Drive?
Hello,
I own two computers: A Windows laptop, and a new MacBook. I play the sims 4 very frequently and play the same save file everyday.
I recently bought a 1TB external SSD drive. Is there a simple way I could have my Mac and Windows PC share the same mods folder/saves??
I use my Windows laptop at home and my Macbook when i'm on the move since i travel pretty frequently.
What would the simplest solution be ? I tried moving my saves and mods folder back and forth with a USB key but it takes a long time since it adds up to around 20gb+ of files and i'm constantly adding/removing things from my mods and updating my save files.
If someone is in a similar situation or knows a good way I can easily play on both devices, i'd really appreciate the help! I have a lot of storage on both devices and my external SSD is empty as of now so storage is not an issue.
I apologize if this is the wrong forum for this question. I wasn't quite sure where to ask this question.
Thank you!!
@night0ceans There's no simple way to do this because Windows and macOS need to use different formats for the external drive. In macOS, mods and custom content will only work if the drive is formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), neither of which Windows can read. While FAT32/exFAT is compatible with both OSs, trying to use mods stored on a drive using this format will cause errors in macOS.
What you could do is partition the drive into three: APFS for Mac, NTFS for Windows, and exFAT for transferring between the two. It would be like having three smaller drives in one enclosure. This would still require you to transfer files back and forth, but after the initial transfer, you'd only be copying smaller files, which shouldn't take too much time with an SSD. For any new mods or cc, you'd have to add them to both drives, once in each OS.
If you want to do this, use Disk Utility to format the drive as APFS in macOS first, then slice off a large chunk of it and format that as exFAT. Plug the drive into Windows, which I believe won't even recognize the APFS partition, and split the exFAT segment, formatting one part as NTFS.
One other possible option is paying for third-party software that lets your Mac write to NTFS-formatted drives. It does work in general, but I don't know whether it works for Sims 4 and how well, so you'd need to be willing to test yourself.
