If you find yourself occasionally being logged out of your Mac after you upgraded to macOS High Sierra, you can stop worrying your Mac isn’t possessed. Our recommendation is not to encrypt your external drive, unless converting to APFS is acceptable to you, and you have no plans to use the drive with earlier versions of the Mac operating system. In either case, the external drive won’t be recognizable by the older operating system. The problem comes about should you ever connect the drive to a Mac running an earlier version of the Mac operating system, or if you boot your Mac to an earlier version of the OS. If these two conditions are met, and you select the option to encrypt the drive, by right-clicking the drive icon and selecting Encrypt from the popup menu, the drive will be converted to APFS format and then encrypted.Įven though the drive has been converted to APFS and encrypted, it will continue to work just fine with your Mac running macOS High Sierra. Must not have a Mac operating system installed on the drive.Under certain conditions, encrypting a drive will modify the format to APFS without the user being aware of the changes. Related: A Note On High Sierra Compatibility with Third Party SSDs (Encrypting an external drive can lead to the drive being converted to an APFS volume.) The same is true for APFS (Apple File System) formatted drives choosing the encryption option shouldn’t change the APFS format of the drive.

If the drive was HFS+ (Hierarchical File System) before you chose to encrypt it, it should remain an HFS+ drive afterwards. MacOS High Sierra continues to support full disk encryption, but Mike Bombich, who created Carbon Copy Cloner, has verified a bug in High Sierra that will cause an external drive to have its format changed from HFS+ to APFS when the drive is encrypted in High Sierra.Įnabling encryption on a drive should not alter the underlying drive format. This is especially true for portable Mac users, who need to worry about their Macs being lost or stolen. Full disk encryption has been a boon for Mac users who worry about their personal data being easily accessible on their Macs or external drives. The tradition lives on with macOS High Sierra, so we’re gathering a list of what High Sierra broke and how to fix it (when you can).Įncrypting an entire drive to add a level of security has been an easy task in the Mac OS ever since FileVault 2 was released as part of OS X Lion. It seems with each new version of the Mac operating system, there are some features that just don’t seem to work the way they used to. It’s almost become a tradition one that we wish we didn’t have to put up with.

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