TIME MACHINE SET UP on new disc

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Just purchased a WDBA24OOBBL 4TB portable disc to use for time machine backup of a Mac mini M! .
I’m not tech savvy and having managed to load the software it is now asking me to erase the disc before it will work with Time M . Presumably it wants to get rid of WD software???

Installation info seems impossible to find on the web site.

At the same time I purchased a 2tb disk to back up a laptop using O/S Catalina and that has been ok without asking me to erase the disc.

What’s going on?

jd

2

Many mac systems support Time Machine on APFS formatted drives only. There might be chances that your drive is in HFS+ format, that’s why it is asking you to erase or reformat the drive in order to create a time machine.

As, if you want to shift a drive from HFS+ to APFS, you have to reformat the drive, and that erases all the Time Machine backups. Because of the structural differences, you can’t just copy from HFS+ to APFS, either.

Further, you can also check the below link for more details:

Hope it helps!

3

Thanks for the replies. Erasing seems to have worked.
The WD files/folders have disappeared.