AmusingUserName wrote:
WD support said there is an incompatibility issue with the last several Mac OS versions and drives formatted in Mac OS Extended Journaled; however, the drive has been working well enough until fairly recently. I also tried the drive on two older laptops running previous OSs with the same result.
My computer is a Macbook Pro 2019 running OS Sonoma 14.5.
Thanks!
This doesn't sound right. I am not an expert on drives like WD is, but I do know that we have had several Time Machine external drives that were on HFS+ from many years ago and as the MacOS was upgraded over the years the Time Machine HFS+ drive continued to work. But I also introduced new drives so each computer had at least two and with the latest MacOS those new drives had to be GUID/APFS to be Time Machine drives. But a number of these Macs (including one that is a 2019 Macbook Pro 16-inch which I think is the same as yours) are presently using both HSF+ and APFS drives for Time Machine. However I have been starting to reformat all the HFS+ ones to APFS, going forward, but we still have some being used for Time Machine.
Also, HFS+ works fine with the latest MacOS. My daughter (who also uses a 2019 Macbook Pro 16-inch, we obtained them a few months apart) has about 40 WD external drives (most are Passport Ultra models), all HFS+, they are full of raw and jpg image files from her photography business. These are very inexpensive drives, but the approach taken is to have two or three clones of each data drive. We have seen 2 drives fail over the past 10 years from the ~ 40 drives, they were among the oldest in the lot. Because we have clones and copies of everything, she is protected, all the data are backed up.
I think your drive has likely failed. You get the same result on other Macs, the common factor is the drive itself. Normally with a drive catalog failure, one partition mounts and the other might not, but your drive ejects which to me sounds like a hardware fault. You could look into drive recovery companies but the cost of that can run into thousands of dollars with no likelihood of success.
In the future, it would be advisable to have multiple Time Machine backups and also separate backups of all external drive files that are valuable. I also agree with Leroy, while one one can indeed partition an external drive and use one for files and the other for Time Machine, it is not as robust as dedicating the drive to Time Machine.
