Hi. Just tried to reformat an old HDD I had in Big Sur and no longer have this option. Journaled exists, but not encrypted. Am I doing something wrong or has it been removed in big sur?
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Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)
- Thread starter Mattyman
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It has been removed. 
And if you try to encrypt later (via control-click in Finder), the HFS+ volume will be converted to APFS encrypted.
But BS will use a disk which was formatted HFS+ encrypted by an older version of macOS. So you either need to a) visit a Mac with older macOS, or b) use a virtual machine. As a test, I used a High Sierra virtual machine to create the HFS+ encrypted volume which could then be mounted and used in Big Sur.
My reading of this is that Apple want to stop using Core Storage which is the container used by Fusion drives and by encrypted HFS+.
My advice: Use APFS encrypted for your external HDD unless you have a very strong reason for wanting HFS+ encrypted.
And if you try to encrypt later (via control-click in Finder), the HFS+ volume will be converted to APFS encrypted.
But BS will use a disk which was formatted HFS+ encrypted by an older version of macOS. So you either need to a) visit a Mac with older macOS, or b) use a virtual machine. As a test, I used a High Sierra virtual machine to create the HFS+ encrypted volume which could then be mounted and used in Big Sur.
My reading of this is that Apple want to stop using Core Storage which is the container used by Fusion drives and by encrypted HFS+.
My advice: Use APFS encrypted for your external HDD unless you have a very strong reason for wanting HFS+ encrypted.
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Damn, this sucks. Monterey is orders of magnitude slower mounting APFS spinning disks than HFS+ - I'd been planning to try converting back, but now...sigh.
Yeah, this sucks. I like to format my external HDs in Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) so I can use Disk Warrior. I've had a very bad experience with APFS-formatted external HDs. For example, I've had to erase a Time Machine backup drive 3 times now and start over because Disk Utility was not able to repair it. This never happened with HFS+.
Maybe the disk is becoming unreliable. My experience with APFS formatted HDD is very good - never needed a repair like they did with HFS+.
After I experienced these issues with my external Time Machine drives, I replaced the main TM drive with a brand-new one. But after a while, the same issue. I've had to reformat and start over twice since I got it maybe a year ago. And it happens on the other ones too. It seems to happen regardless of how I connect them. I use both a ThunderBay 6 Thunderbolt enclosure and a USB 3 'OWC Dual Drive Dock' connected to a 'Late 2018' Mac mini.
Also, I'm frequently getting errors when running First Aid on my internal drive. But they go away if I delete all the snapshots.
Here's an example of running First Aid on one of my external Time Machine backups.
That suggests bigger issues with your Mac than anything purely related to APFS on external HDD.