APFS question .....

[drewaz]

first of all, I am not tech oriented so please go easy!

late 2015 iMac 2 TB fusion drive .... recently applied Mojave and according to Disk Utility, it's now APFS

I have 2 LaCie external hard drives (not SSD) that I use .... one for backup with SuperDuper and another as a home for images in Lightroom.

The backup drive is still HFS+ I think but it looks like the Lightroom drive is now APFS. Somehow the Lightroom backup drive got wiped when it was modified to APFS I suspect. Might have been something I accidentally did but I have a backblaze back up too some I won't lose the pictures.

Anyway, should the external drives be formatted as APFS? Disc Utility doesn't not give me an option to erase and reformat as HFS ... only options are APFS.

Appreciate any advice or insight

 

[DeltaMac]

I can't think of any reason that you should choose to change the format of your external drives, unless you need to change the format for some reason, such as needing to share those drives on other computers, or other operating systems. In fact, changing format on a drive that might be used on other computers might be a mistake.
For example, I have two computers that I use quite often. One is on Mojave (no problem), and the other is running OS X 10.10 Yosemite (can't upgrade because of some old software). An APFS drive is not accessible, and not even visible on Yosemite.

 

[drewaz]

I can't think of any reason that you should choose to change the format of your external drives, unless you need to change the format for some reason, such as needing to share those drives on other computers, or other operating systems. In fact, changing format on a drive that might be used on other computers might be a mistake.
For example, I have two computers that I use quite often. One is on Mojave (no problem), and the other is running OS X 10.10 Yosemite (can't upgrade because of some old software). An APFS drive is not accessible, and not even visible on Yosemite.

yep ... but I think I was doing something that I didn't quite understand, lost all the info on 2 HDs and now they are APFS and I can't find a way to reformat them back. UGH.

I guess all I can do is see if I can back something from my iMac to the LaCie and see it works.