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Disk Utility is telling me that I formatted an external USB drive as APFS encrypted case sensitive (I actually don't remember electing the case sensitive option but I'm not going to argue :)

I use this drive for my Time Machine backups.

Can I reformat this drive as "NOT case sensitive" without losing all my prior backups?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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No. Reformatting always results in an empty volume, leaving you unable to access any previous data. In some cases the data may still be on disk, but it requires special data recovery tools to reconstruct, and typically cannot be completely recovered.

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Don't change anything. What you are seeing is normal.

When you choose a volume (or disk) for Time Machine to use, the volume/disk is always re-formatted as APFS case-sensitive.

The volume is also given the "role" T - Backup. This ensures that macOS will only allow that volume to be modified by Time Machine.

For more (much more), type man diskutil in Terminal app.

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  • thanks. i wonder if this has anything to do with why i can NOT mount my Time Machine Partitions. what i mean is ... i created 2 partitions on a external drive. i use one of those partitions for Time Machine. very often.. MacOS will not mount that time machine partition. this has happened on 3 drives! but it never happens on drives I use for for TM that only have 1 partition
    – Cool Pontiac
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 18:45
  • Do you mean 2 partitions or 2 volumes in a singe partition/container. Either way it should not be a mounting problem. Is this the subject of another question including error messages and detail of configuration diskutil list?
    – Gilby
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 22:32

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