How to transfer files from Mac to PC

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If you are a Mac user and you are going to get a Windows. There must be some files on Mac like songs, photos, document, data, videos that you want to transfer to Mac. If your PC and Mac are in the same Local network, you can use “Samba Support” to do the job easily.

Samba (SMB) is a separate sharing option within OS X’s File Sharing panel; you can follow these steps to enable the SMB on your Mac.

  1. Launch “System Preferences” and click on “Sharing”
  2. Click the checkbox next to “File Sharing” to enable it
  3. Once File Sharing is turned on, select it and then click on the “Options…” button
  4. Click the check box next to “Share files and folders using SMB (Windows)”
  5. Now click on the checkbox next to the user accounts you want to share or access from Windows – when you click to enable SMB sharing on a user account, you will be asked for that users password. Click on “Done”

After you turn the SMB, you can now connect from your PC to the Mac. If you already know the Macs IP address you can pass this first part of this and go directly to the Windows PC to access the shared users directory.

Connect from your PC to the Mac File Share

Back at the ‘Sharing” system preference panel, take note of your Macs IP address as seen below, discard the afp:// portion and pay attention to the numbers in the format of x.x.x.x

 

1. From the PC connecting to the Mac:
2. Go to the Start menu and choose “Run” or hit Control+R from the Windows desktop
3. Enter the IP address of the Mac in the format of \\192.168.1.9\ and choose “OK”
4. Enter the shared Mac OS X users login and password and click on “OK”
5. Access to the shared Mac directory and user files appear as any other folder within Windows. You’re free to copy or access individual files, or perform more substantial tasks like transferring an iTunes library from a PC to a Mac.

What about the .DS_Store files?

Depending on the Windows PC settings, you might see a bunch of .DS_Store files on the Mac file system. These are normal but if you’re peeved by them, you can disable .DS_Store files by entering the following defaults write command in OS X’s Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

If you want them back, just switch that to ‘false’ at the end.

Tommy
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