Change the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click Erase.

In the pop-up window, you have the option to rename your drive and change its format.

Select Erase from the top of the window.

In Disk Utility, select your external drive from the list on the left.

In Finder, go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

Here’s how to format your external drive using Disk Utility: In order to work with Time Machine, your external drive needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT). If your external drive is in one of these unsupported formats, you’ll need to reformat it correctly before it’s used to back up your Mac.

Your drive’s format will appear in the list of general information next to Format:.

You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-I.

In Finder, select the drive from the left sidebar and click Get Info.

Connect your external drive to your Mac.

To determine the format of your external hard drive: While it’s fine that your Mac uses APFS, Time Machine can’t. However, there is one macOS format that doesn’t work, either: APFS. While Windows FAT and NTFS are used as the default file system for many external drives, Time Machine can’t use them - it requires a native macOS format. One potential problem that may prevent Time Machine from performing backups is that your external hard drive is formatted incorrectly, making it incompatible with Time Machine. Make sure your external hard drive’s file system is compatible with Time Machine If you’re one of those users, check out our tips for troubleshooting when Time Machine won’t back up your files.

Unfortunately, many Mac users have reported that they’re having difficulty backing up with Time Machine after upgrading their computers to the latest macOS version.

It’s one of the most important ones as it automatically backs up all of your files on an external drive (and restores them if they’re ever deleted).

Time Machine is a built-in feature on your Mac. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below. So here's a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

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