Using unity files from a USB or external Hard drive for Mac and PC?

Greetings People of Unity,
I'm a complete noob to Unity with a mac and pc, wondering whether or not I can just save project files onto a USB and access/edit those files from both Mac and PC without any issues. I plan to use the macbook whilst at school and the PC whilst at home(obviously).

If there is any other way of transferring files or you know of a more efficient way to, then please do share with comprehensible steps for this complete noob. Thanks!

 

As far as I know using a USB works perfectly fine for saving projects (Saving takes a tad bit longer but it works). I'm not quite sure if there would be any problem when switching projects from mac to windows and the other way around. I don't think there would be an issue though

 

I stayed at a friend's house for a while and I not only kept my projects on a USB 3.0 stick, but also ran Unity off the USB. It worked fine, loading it up is slower than I'm used to with my SSD but it's completely usable.

You might want to consider Bootcamping Windows onto the MacBook. You probably can get by without paying to activate it as most of Windows 10 works without activation.

 

Thanks for this post, guys. I'm running Bootcamp on a mac, and my partition space isn't as hefty as I would like it. I ordered an external hard drive and will wait to download and use Unity when it arrives. Will run Unity completely off the hard drive.

 

Keep in mind (for anyone who finds this thread) that USB sticks can be quite unreliable and are also easy to lose/have stolen. If you are going to use a USB drive for your project, make sure to make frequent backups somewhere. Better yet, use source control software (e.g. Git, SVN etc)

 

I've tried saving my Unity project to external disk, separate partitions, and just shared folders on my Mac. I'm not even trying to edit it via Windows anymore, I just want multiple users on the same Mac to have access to it.

It doesn't work. When one Mac user saves the files, it locks the file permissions so that only they can write to those folders. The other users won't be able to edit the files and sometimes even trying corrupts them beyond repair.

If you manually remove the permission and give read/write to everyone, or even specific users, they'll be marked as only readable by the next person who edits.

So, since it isn't even possible to share project directories on the same machine but different users, I doubt you could share them across different computers with different OSs so easily.

I've resorted to using Collaborate to download multiple versions of the same projects to the same hard drive. Ugh.