macOS 28 Will Drop Support For Encrypted Mac OS Extended Volumes
4 72Starting with macOS 28, Apple will no longer support encrypted Mac OS Extended, or HFS+, volumes. Users will need to decrypt them or reformat them as APFS to keep using them. 9to5Mac reports: In a new support document, Apple explains that starting with macOS 28, "the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren't encrypted." In practice, this means users who currently rely on encrypted HFS+ external drives or other encrypted legacy Mac-formatted volumes will need to "either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes."
Apple doesn't explain the reason for the change. Still, the move appears to be another step in Apple's transition to APFS, its file system with built-in encryption support, which replaced Mac OS Extended as the default Mac file system in macOS High Sierra. As a result of this change, Apple says that starting with macOS 26, Macs might notify users when they're using an encrypted Mac OS Extended disk that won't be compatible with macOS 28 or later.
According to the support page, "the notification will identify the volume by name." However, Apple says users can manually confirm whether a volume is both using Mac OS Extended format and encrypted by following these steps [...]. Apple adds that "macOS 28 and later will continue to support unencrypted volumes that use Mac OS Extended format," and notes "Mac OS Extended is also known as HFS Plus (or HFS+)."
4 comments
Re:Remove Encryption? (Score: 5, Informative)
by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Thursday July 09, 2026 @01:21PM (#66230278)
They're not removing encryption support, they have a modern filesystem that you can use with encryption. They're only dropping it from their deprecated 1990s-era filesystem. They're telling people to move to the modern filesystem if they want to use encrypted drives.
Re:Remove Encryption? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Thursday July 09, 2026 @01:39PM (#66230324)
My guess, and I don't use macOS, or any Apple product, they want to remove the encryption code to clean up possible future security issues. I would bet they have a separate process / driver just to handle HFS+ encryption, that's not being maintained, or, can't be maintained due to previous compatibility requirements, so they're just forcing users to move.
Realistically, it's not that rare to change your secure volumes, or move them between services. Changing from VeraCrypt to KDE Plasma Vaults, or, changing the encryption standard in use, something I've done a few times. Supporting legacy just sucks, and there are times when you simply have to, but if you can prevent legacy support, do it.
Re: Remove Encryption? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Thursday July 09, 2026 @01:59PM (#66230360)
I've mentioned before about the terrible code bases I've had to work on. There was a RTOS, with some crazy long function that beeped a speaker. I couldn't figure out what the function was really doing, so I broke it down line by line. Turns out, the speaker was being triggered, to reset a watch dog timer, due to a bug in the watch dog handler of the MCU. Triggering the speaker, I think, pulled a line low, which caused a voltage change, which then you could capture, it was very strange, and I might have that slightly wrong.
There was another project where to use a Microchip radio transceiver, you had to send the data, then wait Xms, then trigger a register, and yada yada yada, which was due to a bug in the transceiver. They fixed that bug ~1 year after, but we had shipped the old boards into production, so for the life of that product there were two radio functions. One to send via the old radio logic, and one that didn't need that junk, but, to update functionality, you had to add it to both functions and work around it.
Luckily that product died mid-COVID, but, I can keep going on of N products with these stupid, idiotic, annoying, but understandable strangeness in them. So my guess is: They want to clean up the code-base, and get it running in a slimmer, cleaner fashion without the bloat.
HFS+ is ancient (Score: 5, Informative)
by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Thursday July 09, 2026 @01:14PM (#66230264)
HFS+ was introduced with MacOS 8.1 in the late 90s. It doesn't even support dates past the year 2040. It makes sense for them to start phasing it out.