Mac Format - UK (2019-12)

EDITED BY HOWARD OAKLEY

What’s inside

54

CATALINA & OLD

HARD DRIVES

It’s more about the file

format than the devices

55

iOS SOFTWARE

Swipe away your

touchscreen troubles

56-57

MAC HARDWARE

We solve your

hardware hassles

58-59

macOS

Sage advice to help

overcome Mac maladies

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Our resident genius

solves your Mac and

iOS problems

EXPERT

ADVICE

54 | MACFORMAT

Can you still use old hard

drives with macOS Catalina?

macOS Catalina supports all traditional

file systems including Mac OS Extended or

HFS+ and the variants of DOS FAT, as well as

featuring the latest improvements to APFS,

so it shouldn’t have a problem.

Any issues are most likely to arise in the

file formats themselves, particularly old audio,

still images, and video. Catalina has lost

support for some old QuickTime compression

formats, which Apple has outlined in bit.ly/

mf346incmd. If any of your old documents

use those formats, then accessing them in

Catalina will be more tricky.

One good solution for playing old video

formats is the free IINA from iina.io. There are

some other document types, including older

Microsoft Word .doc files, which can’t always

be read by current versions of Word.

Q

If I upgrade my MacBook Air 2015

to macOS Catalina, will I still be

able to access my several hard

drives and old CD-ROMs?

by PETE SINGER

A

Potential issues in accessing old

external storage devices fall into

three tiers: storage medium, file

system, and format.

If a storage device connects to your Mac

without relying on a special kernel extension,

and works just with a regular USB or other

port, then it should continue to work fine.

Some specialised devices may rely on

installing a kernel extension, which if it

isn’t updated may not work, but instances

of these are pretty unusual.

iMovie, Final Cut Pro and Compressor

in Mojave should convert most video

from formats unsupported in Catalina.

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