Morning came, and with it a freshly formatted 128 GB of pristine digital landscape all ready to be encrypted and. And then I left it running and went to bed, because 2 hours later, we had just finished the first pass. To my dismay, APFS was not an available option for formatting, so I opted for Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and since I was doing this, may as well scrub the thing right, so I added the 7-pass wipe to the mix just to be sure nothing would still be hanging around later gumming things up and disconcerting the passers-by. 'But,' I said (actually out loud), 'perhaps option 2 is required before we have option 1 available since the disk was formatted as Ex-FAT.' So off to disk utility we go.Īfter copying the one folder I wanted to keep to my system drive, I set about nuking the whole thing from orbit (it's the only way to be sure). Finder offers no such option in the context menu: Neither of these procedures is even possible, because those options are not available. Format the with Disk Utility using the APFS option with encryption (I may not have that exactly right but it doesn't matter as you'll soon understand).

In Finder ctrl+click the device in the sidebar and select 'Encrypt' from the context menu, or.I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to encrypt an external USB drive, and so far every single piece of documentation I can find all say the same 2 things.

I might have figured out why this isn't working, but I don't much like the answer if I'm right.

Guid partition table mac