iPadOS 15 + Encrypted APFS drives, is this supposed to work?

[s4yunkim]

iPad Pro M1, running iPadOS 15.2
+
USB-C SSD, formatted with APFS (Encrypted)

I could have sworn that I used this combination and had the drive show up in the files app.
I’ve tried reformatting the drive in APFS (non-encrypted) and it shows up just fine in the files app, but the moment I format it in Encrypted, it fails to show up on the sidebar.

I see that iPadOS 14 added support for encrypted drives, and articles like these: [article, another article] seem to explicitly call out that encrypted drives only work if they are in APFS encrypted. Is this broken? Or am I doing something wrong?

 

[DeepIn2U]

I believe it's supposed to work from my former '18 iPad Pro 11" and APFS Encrypted drive from a previous Intel macOS Big Sur setup. I cannot recall 100% though.

 

[fwmireault]

I just tried with my USB-C SSD in APFS on my iPad Pro (2021) and everything works as expected. It pops on the sidebar in the Files app, where I can enter my password

 

[s4yunkim]

I just tried with my USB-C SSD in APFS on my iPad Pro (2021) and everything works as expected. It pops on the sidebar in the Files app, where I can enter my password

Out of curiosity, what MacOS are you running? And did you click on the drive itself and format it? Or did you select a particular partition?

 

[s4yunkim]

I have a feeling this is due to something weird about disk utility. When formatting the drive, I definitely picked APFS Encrypted, but the log that showed up said it was formatting a partition in HFS? I tried clicking the partition and the container itself to do the format, and one of them worked. I could see the drive on the iPad. I tried to reproduce it... and now I can't make it show again.

 

[fwmireault]

Out of curiosity, what MacOS are you running? And did you click on the drive itself and format it? Or did you select a particular partition?

I run macOS 12.1. When I formatted my SSD, I formatted the drive itself, and then split it in two partitions (both AFPS encrypted). One of those is my Time Machine backup, which doesn't show on the iPad, but my other partition shows just fine even if it's encrypted

 

[s4yunkim]

Hm. I've formatted this drive in both Big Sur and Monterey, and it seems like it's kind of a hit or miss whether it comes up on the files app. The last 6-7 times I've tried plugging in the drive, 4 of the times it shows up, the rest of the times it does not.

The part that gets me is that when it's formatted non encrypted, it comes up every time, without fail. Now this makes me think that it's a files app or iOS issue....