

And forget about reading an APFS drive from Windows: there aren’t even third-party tools out there for that yet.ĪPFS also isn’t compatible with Time Machine at this time, so you’ll have to format backup drives as Mac OS Extended. If there’s an older Mac you need a drive to work with, APFS is a bad choice for that drive. 2016’s macOS Sierra was the first operating system capable of reading and writing to APFS systems, meaning any Mac using an older operating system will not be able to write to APFS-formatted drives. So what’s the catch? Reverse compatibility. Let’s dive into a bit more details about the top three choices below, and then explain a few of the sub-options. The other factors, like encryption and case sensitivity, aren’t something you should get too hung up on. Use this for an external drive that will plug into both kinds of computers.Ĭhoosing a file system is basically choosing between these three options. ExFAT is the best cross platform option, designed to work on Windows and macOS systems.

On macOS High Sierra, it’s used on all mechanical and hybrid drives, and older versions of macOS used it by default for all drives.

