Format external hard drive mac apple time machine apfs mac os#
Then your Mac can reformat the drive to APFS or HFS+ Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just make sure that any files on the external hard drive or SSD drive are copied off first. I used these helpful instructions from SuperDuper to partition part of my external drive to also backup with Time Machine: I wish Apple would standardize formats with the OS and Time Machine, I spent a lot of time trying to set this up. macOS Big Sur supports Time Machine on APFS-formatted drives, but there are a few catches The updated macOS finally allows you to use a drive formatted with Appleās not-very-new APFS filesystem. All external hard drives can be reformatted by your Mac. After some research I discovered Time Machine only uses the old Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. The external hard drive didn't appear as an available drive.
After successfully doing a completely new backup I tried to do the same with Time Machine. Here, 2022 top 3 recommended USB format tools are available to help you format a USB flash drive, external USB drive, SD card, etc., to a Mac-supported file system. I ran SuperDuper first and found I had to re-format my external hard drive to the newer APFS. Step 2: From the left side panel, pick the volume or the drive that you want to format and switch to the Erase tab. I always backup my iMac to an external drive with Time Machine and the great clone program SuperDuper. Step 1: Connect the USB drive or external drive to Mac and launch the Disk Utility from Applications. In any case, this shows that Big Sur chooses APFS as the best default formatting for Time Machine disks. I guess they will name it version 2 eventually. If you want to back up your Mac data using Time Machine, you need to use an external hard drive to save the Time Machine. So, Apple has moved its build from 2 to 237 from Sierra to Big Sur.
I finally upgraded to Catalina, I'm still learning some of the differences. On he other hand, macOS 10.12.6 (16G2136) Sierra has Time Machine 1.3 (2).