Do not encrypt a drive unless you can remember the key, or unless you have somewhere secure to store it.
![]() The other factors, like encryption and case sensitivity, arent something you should get too hung up on. Lets dive into a bit more details about the top three choices below, and then explain a few of the sub-options. Exfat Or Ms-Dos Fat And Windows Mac OS ExtendedFirst released in 2016, it offers all sorts of benefits over Mac OS Extended, the previous default. And improvements to metadata mean its very quick to do things like determine how much space a folder is taking up on your drive. There are also a number of reliability improvements, making things like corrupted files a lot less common. Were just skimming the surface, so check out our article about everything you need to know about APFS for more information about the benefits of APFS. If theres an older Mac you need a drive to work with, APFS is a bad choice for that drive. And forget about reading an APFS drive from Windows: there arent even third-party tools out there for that yet. To this day, it remains the default file system for mechanical and hybrid hard drives, both while installing macOS and while formatting external drives. This is in part because the benefits of APFS arent as clear on mechanical drives. The format dates back to 2006, and was made by Microsoft to provide some of the cross-platform compatibility of the older FAT32 format without the file and partition size limitations. Its not a particularly optimized file formatits far more vulnerable to file fragmentation than APFS or Mac OS Extended, for one thing, and metadata and other features used by macOS arent present. Sure, you could read a Mac formatted drive on Windows or read a Windows formatted drive on a Mac, but both solutions either cost money or are unstable. So despite the disadvantages, ExFAT is your best option for cross-platform hard drives. And unless you really know what youre doing, and have a specific reason for wanting it, you shouldnt use case sensitivity when formatting a drive. Case Sensitivity mostly determines whether the file system sees capital letters as different. By default, it doesnt, which is why you cant have a file called Fun.txt and fun.txt in the same folder on a Mac. The file system sees the file names as identical, even if they look different to you. Exfat Or Ms-Dos Fat And Windows Mac OS X Was TheUNIX-based systems are generally case sensitive and Mac OS X was the first Mac operating system based on the UNIX standard, so this is a little unusual. Presumably, a case-sensitive file system was just seen as less user-friendly. Theres not many benefits to turning it on, but all kinds of things might break, and dragging files from one to the other might mean data loss. Both APFS and Mac OS Extended offer an Encrypted option, and if security is a concern, its a good idea to use this on external drives.
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