New life for an external hard drive

Yesterday I thought I should back up my Mac to my WD external hard drive. It had been a while (248 days, as the Time Machine app would tell me). When I connected the WD drive, an alert popped up: macOS 28 will support only external drives formatted with AFPS (Apple File System). Oh well, thought I, I’ll have to buy a new external drive, but I had better back up onto this drive now.

Something went wrong, and the backup froze at 23% complete, with the time remaining estimated at twelve hours. And I found that I couldn’t drag the drive to the trash, nor could I open a single folder on the desktop. So I unplugged the drive, restarted the Mac, and tried again, with the same result. I started looking online to see how problems with an external hard drive (such as bad sectors) might be fixed. And a sentence from an article at MacRumors (July 2026) got me thinking:

Apple yesterday published a new support document warning that macOS 28 will no longer support encrypted Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volumes, meaning affected external drives will need to be decrypted or reformatted ahead of the update.

The pop-up alert on my Mac said nothing about decrypting or reformatting — the implication seemed, at least to me, to be that the user would need to get a new drive. I wondered if reformatting my WD drive might solve whatever problem caused the backup to freeze, so I did some more looking and decided to try. I opened the Mac’s Disk Utility app, erased the external drive, and reformatted it with APFS. Each step took just a couple of minutes. I then tried backing up, and everything was done in an hour or so.

Much better than spending $149 or so for a new external drive and figuring out what to do with the old one. Maybe this post will help another Mac user save money.