Support in macOS for file systems has continued to change over the last couple of years. This article summarises support available for local file systems, in attached rather than network or cloud storage, in macOS 26.1 Tahoe.

APFS

This is the default file system for Macs and Apple’s devices, although macOS has standardised on its case-insensitive variant for general use, while iOS and other OSes use case-sensitive. The one common exception is with Time Machine backup storage, which requires case-sensitivity. The only situation in which HFS+ is still expected is for bootable macOS installers.

The most significant feature of HFS+ that is missing in APFS is directory hard links, a key feature of Time Machine backups made to HFS+ storage.

Multiple APFS volumes can share the same APFS partition (container), in contrast to other file systems supported by macOS, in which each partition is also a volume.

As universal as APFS is on modern Macs, it’s very rarely available on other computer systems, and the only support for other platforms is from Paragon for Windows or for Linux.

HFS+

The Macintosh Extended file system HFS+ is the predecessor to APFS and is still fully supported in macOS. It comes from an era of hard disks rather than SSDs and may still be preferred for use on hard disks. Early versions were prone to cumulative errors, particularly when crashes or kernel panics occurred. Those risks were mitigated with the introduction of journalling, and HFS+ should only be used with journalling enabled. Currently supported versions of macOS no longer support its HFS predecessor, though, as that was dropped in 2019.

The only remaining situation in which HFS+ is still required is for bootable macOS installers, as detailed here.

HFS+ lacks many of the modern features of APFS, including snapshots, sparse files, clone files, and firmlinks used to join System and Data volumes. Because support for encryption was implemented late, in Core Storage logical volume management, recent macOS doesn’t support encrypted HFS+. However, like APFS, HFS+ is capable of supporting Trim on SSDs. Each HFS+ volume is a partition, thus has fixed size, in contrast to APFS partitions (containers) which can contain multiple volumes.

ExFAT, FAT32

These are two of a family of file systems introduced for MS-DOS and Windows. Although the older FAT formats are now antiquated, ExFAT remains the most commonly encountered format for USB flash drives (thumb drives, memory sticks) and SD cards, where it’s the default format for SDXC and SDUC cards larger than 32 GB. Unlike FAT32, ExFAT supports massive volumes and file sizes, and was optimised for use in flash memory. However, its implementation in macOS doesn’t support Trim.

These formats have relatively basic features, and lack encryption. Used from a Mac, they don’t have support for document versions, and may encounter indexing problems with Spotlight. They do, though, support extended attributes by using AppleDouble file format, in which those are saved in shadow files with names starting with ._ (dot – underscore). While those shadow files preserve extended attributes for use with macOS, they can confuse Windows users, for whom they can be deleted, for example using Ross Tulloch’s BlueHarvest.

In recent versions of macOS, these file systems are implemented in user-space using FSKit.

NTFS

Although you won’t find any mention of it in Disk Utility, macOS includes read-only support for NTFS, enabling the one-way transfer of files from Windows. There are third-party products to extend that with write support, including an implementation from Paragon. NTFS is significant for its support of extended attributes as Alternate Data Streams (ADS).

Available formats

Disk Utility version 22.7 in macOS 26.1 Tahoe can format the following file systems using a GUID Partition Map:

• APFS, unencrypted case-insensitive
• APFS, encrypted case-insensitive
• APFS, unencrypted case-sensitive
• APFS, encrypted case-sensitive
• HFS+ journalled case-insensitive (JHFS+)
• HFS+ journalled case-sensitive
• ExFAT
• MS-DOS (FAT32).

The command tool diskutil additionally offers FAT, FAT12, FAT16, and HFS+ without journalling.

ZFS

The only other major file system that can be supported by Macs is ZFS, available as OpenZFS on OS X. That isn’t a trivial undertaking, and is dependent on a kernel extension.

Linux file systems

There doesn’t appear to be native support for modern Linux file systems such as Btrfs and Ext4, which are best accessed through Linux virtualisation when needed.

MacFUSE

Traditionally, native file systems are implemented in kernel-space, requiring a kernel extension for macOS. This remains the case for those used by the operating system and for performance-critical tasks. In other cases, it’s possible to implement a file system in user-space without the need for a kernel extension. This has been the goal of the FUSE project, and with the introduction of FSKit support for user-space file systems in macOS, the MacFUSE implementation now runs without any kext. It’s hoped that will open up access to more file systems in the future.