I have an external SSD drive which has 4 bootable partitions holding monthly backups. It has a GUID partition map; each partition is MacOS Extended Journaled (HFS+); each is 250GB in size with about 120GB in use. The partitions are not encrypted; I do not think it uses Core Storage.
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk2
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1
2: Apple_HFS SSDmon1 250.0 GB disk2s2
3: Apple_HFS SSDmon2 249.9 GB disk2s3
4: Apple_HFS SSDmon3 249.6 GB disk2s4
5: Apple_HFS ARCH_B3 249.9 GB disk2s5
I recently upgraded from Mojave 10.14.6 to Catalina 10.15.7 on this 2012 MacBook Pro.
I used SuperDuper! to back up the new system to a different external drive, and it needed to convert the destination to APFS. So I guess bootable backups now need to be APFS.
My questions:
Can I convert the entire external SSD to APFS? How?
Or do I need to convert each partition separately? (I know I can do that with Disk Utility or 'diskutil')
If the second, will they be put into the same container, or will there be four containers with one volume each? If four containers, can they be joined into one container?
I'm afraid to do something wrong and mess up the drive, so I'd like to hear suggestions and warnings before I attempt anything. It would not be the end of the world to lose the backups, but I'd rather avoid that if I could.
Thank you!
diskutil list
output for the external drive(s).