How should I format my external hard drive?

[NoelKnoll]

I have a personal iMAC and a work Dell, running windows 10. I need to be able to use the iMAC when I work from home and save files to my external hard drive than can then be seen, read and edited using my Windows work computer... and vice versa.

I thought that partitioning the external was the best way to go, but after backing up my MAC using Time Machine, once I connect the external to my windows computer, it can only see the ExFAT formatted drive, which from there formatted that to be NTFS. Should I not have partitioned the drive?

Again, I need to be able to create a design file using adobe CC on either my MAC or PC and have that be read and editable by either machine. Is this possible without using a third party formatting solution? I've heard maybe bootstrap could solve my problem...? I just need to know the best solution from someone who knows what they are talking about because I have zero clue how to problem solve this and I am exhausted of the various ways Google is telling me to do it.

Please help!
Thank you!
Noel

 

[iFargle]

IIRC your only option here is FAT -- OS X can't write to NTFS and Windows can't read anything other than NTFS and fAT.

 

[NoelKnoll]

IIRC your only option here is FAT -- OS X can't write to NTFS and Windows can't read anything other than NTFS and fAT.

Okay, so I erase the hard drive that I've partitioned and then format the drive for ExFAT via my MAC. Then use time machine to back everything up onto the drive. Then connect the hard drive to the PC, and put everything I need from there onto the drive. And all of the files on the drive will be readable and editable using either my MAC or my PC?