APFS Format not reversible?

Question

Created Jun ’17

Replies 4

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Updated my late 2015 iMac 27" to 10.13 yesterday. Installed quickly and easily. It does not convert the file system to APFS, so I decided to test something. I have two backups of the primary drive in the iMac, so I decided to use the disk utility to format one of the backup drives to APFS. Worked fine. However, two things have happened. First (not surprisingly actually), neither SuperDuper nor Carbon Copy Cloner will backup the 10.13 drive to an APFS formatted drive. After trying this several times and having CCC not copy anything, and SD copy about a third before running into system files that it didn't like, I decided to reformat the backup drive back to the previous format. However, using Disk Utility, it does not seem possible to do that kind of a reformat since APFS is greyed out on the drive format line, and you can't pick another option.

Is this by design, or is this a feature that will be updated in a future beta, or is it a bug.

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Answer 1

paulrbarnard OP

Jun ’17

Did you try partition rather than erase?

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Answer 2

Gabo Moreno-Hagelsieb OP

Oct ’17

It's not reversible with diskutility, but, if you have a linux machine, that can solve the problem. I did the same thing with my backup drive, converted to apfs, then I could not backup. Checked online. Saw that I should not have done that. Saw that diskutility did not offer the option for HFS+ for the drive. Cried. Then connected to a linux. Formatted to HFS+ in the linux. Done!

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Answer 3

KMT OP

Oct ’17

>I did the same thing with my backup drive, converted to apfs,

Which beta?

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Answer 4

xgman OP

Oct ’17

I inadvertently formatted my TM SSD drive to APFS and it was no problem (other than wiping the data) to format back to HFS in disk utility. I'll assume that the OS drive would not like that though.

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