MacBook Air and iMac not recognizing exFAT drives consistently

KBH_Very_Stable_Genius wrote:

• Using MacBook Air and IMac with two external drives, drives periodically and unpredictably disappear from desktop...can't be found with Disk Utility...mind you these are primary back-up drives and when this happens it gives me heartburn...FINALLY found a workaround but it is weird:

unplug external from Mac

• plug drive in old reliable Chromebook

• opens drive and displays files perfectly

• eject drive from Chromebook

• plug drive back in Mac...THERE IT IS!

Something to do with exFat...as recommended...but clearly Mac doesn't care for it. Falsely blamed vendors.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

What backup application are you using with the two drives?

Why don't you use Mac compatible formats on the drives, APFS for SSDs or OS X Extended (journaled) for HDDs. You won't have any problems with those formats.

Also if you're storing Photos libraries on the ExFAT drives that could damage the library preventing form being successfully restored and working is case it's needed.

The only reason one should be using an ExFAT formatted drive if one was sharing it between a Mac and a Windows machine for data transfer and/or storage (except for Photos libraries).

If you need to use the drive with a Windows device it must be ExFAT or FAT 32. The Mac formats will not work.