FirstAid drive errors in Sonoma with APFS drives

ppavelka wrote:

Thanks for the info. I updated Sonoma 14.7.2 and ran First Aid on the container. Still no luck. This is an external 4TB drive with a secondary backup, so I may just blow out the whole drive and repartition.

Glad to see some people do back up their data even when stored on external media. Good job!

Being an external drive, there is always a chance the drive has a hardware issue that corrupted the file system. You can try checking the health of the external drive by running the third party app DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to attempt to access the external drive's health information, unfortunately some devices won't allow the necessary communication even with the special USB driver installed.

I'm using an Intel based 2020 iMac, and I'm fairly new to APFS formatting (I want to stay encrypted). I'd appreciate any formatting tips you might have for reliability when I repartition.

I've never encrypted an external macOS data drive before, but I think you just need to choose the APFS (encrypted) file system option when erasing the external drive. I don't think recent versions of macOS allow users to encrypt HFS+ volumes anymore although they can still unlock & access them. Perhaps another more knowledgeable contributor will chime in to confirm or provide their insight here.

Here are two Apple articles regarding encrypting external drives (they may also mix in details about encrypting the internal drive as well which makes them a bit confusing in a way....Apple isn't very good with documentation). It seems you can either select an encryption option when erasing a drive/volume, or you can encrypt an existing partition/volume & retain its data.

Encrypt and protect a storage device with a password in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Protect your Mac information with encryption - Apple Support

FYI, if you want to have an encrypted HFS+ volume, then it appears you would need to create it on a Mac running macOS 10.13 High Sierra or earlier, since the 2nd Apple article I linked says macOS 10.14+ will convert an HFS+ file system to APFS & then encrypt it.

Also....HFS+ is the same thing as MacOS Extended (Journaled), just much easier to type.

Also curious if mixed MacOS Extended and APFS formats on the drive can cause problems?

I highly recommend against having multiple partitions on a single drive. Usually people discover much later that one or both partitions are too small and the only way to fix it is to start over (for an external drive you may be able to delete the second partition, attempt to merge it back into the first partition, then resize it again to create a new second partition). I've never tried that with an encrypted APFS volume. Modifying partitions with data on them is always risky.

If you are using the HFS+ partition so that older versions of macOS (10.12 and earlier) can access the storage, then be aware that they won't understand the APFS partition and may prompt you to erase it which can be annoying.

In case you are not aware, if you are using the APFS file system, then you can create multiple APFS volumes within a single APFS Container (aka partition) without needing to resize anything since other APFS volumes share the storage pool of the parent Container. These APFS volumes within a single Container act a lot like partitions since they can be individually mounted & unmounted, as well as individually encrypted (or a mix).

Add, delete, or erase APFS volumes in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Run First Aid on the hidden Container. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the hidden Container appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. By running First Aid on the hidden APFS Container, it will also automatically run First Aid on all of the APFS volumes within that Container. Sometimes the Container will have a problem that will prevent repairs on the APFS volumes within that Container.

Run First Aid again until the errors are gone. If after several scans the errors remain, then you will need to run First Aid while booted into Recovery Mode. If the errors still remain after several more scans, then you will need to perform a clean install of macOS by first erasing the disk (destroys the data on the drive) followed by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup.

If you haven't done so already you should update to Sonoma 14.7.2.