[Joshua]

I can’t seem to find any confirmed up-to-date info on this… I have a MacBook Air and I like to do manual backups of the ‘essential’ data to my external 4gb seagate spinning HDD (separate from the automated backups). I recently decided to encrypt my local backup as I was visiting Mexico City. The problem is it seems I would have to use a VM with something like Mojave to encrypt HFS+, or move to APFS encrypted. My experience with APFS on a spinning hard drive has not been good, as it seems to be terribly slow. From what I can read, Apple still supports using HFS encrypted, but doesn’t let a newer OS format it as such. Is it true that HFS+ (encrypted in this case) is still the best option for formatting a spinning hard drive on a Mac? Or perhaps APFS has been tweaked since I tried it last?
A second question I would tack on here is… APFS encrypted should do fine for my SanDisk Extreme 2tb SSD (also external), correct?

[TeamKomando:John]

Hello Joshua,

Please tap or click here for an awesome comparison of filesystems for MacOS showing the pros and cons of for each.

Either filesystem you go with I highly recommend you start using an external SSD or even an enclosure to house a PCI-E SSD.

[Author]

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