Although we only recently saw the introduction of macOS 27, with its public version not arriving until September, Apple did not hesitate and discreetly announced the first news for the successor of this system – macOS 28. However, the result is not entirely positive, as Apple is preparing to cut out another piece of its past next year. This time, the change doesn't affect older Macs per se, but external drives and other storage formatted in the older Mac OS Extended file system, also known as HFS+. More precisely, it will be their encrypted variantu, which will no longer be supported from macOS 28. The Californian giant announced this through a new supporting document published on his website.
You might be interested in
In other words, if you have an older external drive in a drawer somewhere with data encrypted using Mac OS Extended, after updating to macOS 28, your Mac may no longer be able to read it. Apple therefore, it warns of this change in advance, saying that starting with macOS 26, users may start seeing a notification if the system detects a similar disk. The goal is to give people time to check their data, back it up, and possibly convert it to a more modern format.
Gallery
The reason is simple.
The reason is apparently another move towards APFS, a file system that Apple has been used as the default since macOS High Sierra. It is simply better suited for modern Macs, SSD storage and encryption, and Apple has been trying to enforce it for many years. Unencrypted drives in Mac OS Extended format should not be affected by the change, so the problem will mainly affect older external drives, archival storage or backups that users have encrypted in the past.
If you want to be sure that the change doesn't affect you, just open Disk Utility, select the disk in question, and check its format. As soon as you see the combination of Mac OS Extended and Encrypted, you need to be careful. Apple In this case, it is recommended to back up the content first and then either reformat the disk to APFS, or APFS encrypted, or decrypt it first and then convert it to a newer file system.
You might be interested in
The good news is that this isn't a change that should surprise users overnight. macOS 28 won't arrive until next year, so there's still plenty of time to check your older drives. On the other hand, it's something that's easy to put off, forget about, and then find out in a few years that you can't access your old data as easily as you used to. So if you've been using a Mac for a long time and have older external drives at home, it might be the perfect time toonepull them out of the drawer and see what's actually on them. I'm personally pleased that even though it's Apple In terms of changes and innovations for future software and hardware products, a secretive person usually has no problem coming forward with information like this when it comes to something more fundamental, which is definitely the end of support for the aforementioned type of encryption.
