You’ll get a message telling you your Time Machine backup drive is formatted. Your Mac will take a few moments to format your hard drive. Happy there are no files you want on your drive? Then click the Erase button. The red arrows in the picture show you where you can find the format and scheme list of options. It’s only used for much older PowerPC based Mac computers. Or you’ll have all sorts of odd problems using your drive later on your Mac.ĭon’t pick Apple Partition Map. Your Mac needs the GUID Partition Map scheme. No matter which Mac file format you pick.

But you can run APFS on external hard drives too. Because it was designed and optimized to take advantage of the speed of APFS drives. So, don’t use APFS for OS X versions older than that.Īnother thing. Because those older Mac OS X versions can’t use an APFS formatted external drive for a Time Machine backup.ĪPFS support for Time Machine was only available since Mac OS Big Sur. When your Mac is running a Mac OS X version that’s Catalina or earlier. This is also true if your external disk drive is currently in an ExFAT format. Then format a second time and you’ll see the APFS format comes up as an option to pick. You’ll have to pick Mac OS Extended first. You’ll need to pick Mac OS Extended (Journaled) the first time you format.īecause your Mac needs to change the Windows PC format of a NTFS drive to a Mac file format first.Įven if you want your backup disk in APFS format. When your drive is an NTFS formatted drive. The age of your Mac and the operating system your Mac is running. Or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system.Īnd which you pick depends on the current format of your drive. In the Format field you can pick APFS ( Apple File System). Pick APFS Or Mac OS Extended File System. Pick something that makes it easy for you to know this is your Apple Time Machine drive.

Format hard drive in mac