External SSD drives corrupted and fail with Big Sur

Jerome Vitner wrote:

Although I am now stable on Big Sur, I am still not happy with Apple. Software doesn't just work if you leave stuff behind when you upgrade. Apple is ultimately responsible for the entire ecosystem and although this was WD's fault for not documenting and cleaning up their software, Apple needs to be better at identifying obsolete software. The fact that I had to spend my own time to diagnose and resolve this problem with basically no assistance from either vendor is not good.

I couldn't disagree more.

It isn't Apple's responsibility to track the billions of pieces of third party software in the world and try to figure out what might be compatible with a new OS release and what won't.

They do what they can - each new OS release will move apps it knows won't work because they use outdated libraries and such to an incompatible apps folder, but for the rest Apple can neither test them all nor be prescient about whatever ill-informed assumptions were baked into them.

Migration Assistant has always had that issue, as once again Apple can't know whether the application bits it's copying over are a broken third party utility or something vital for use on your company's network.

Sorry you had these issues. A search of these communities would have resulted in viewing hundreds if not thoudands of posts where we have recommended to not install external disk manufacturer's drive management software. The best approach to using external drives is to use Apple's Disk Utility to manage external drives.

Confirming.

I upgraded to Big Sur a few weeks ago.

Since then...

The SD card I use for photography was suddenly unreadable, trying to reformat it broke it completely. Is not readable or restorable from my Macbook Pro, my wife's Windows machine, or my camera.

The external hard drive I use for backups (Journaling case sensitive Mac filesystem) started giving write errors when trying to copy files to it and doesn't mount on the updated MacBook anymore.

I did get my other Mac (not upgraded) to access it in read-only emergency mode and am now creating safety copies.

Big Sur with all its shortcomings caused me many hours of unnecessary work and has weakened my formerly firm belief in Apple as a producer of mature, reliable products. I feel reminded of Windows (what was the big fail's name again)... ME? Vista?

Whoever user reads this at the beginning of 2021 - DO NOT UPDATE TO BIG SUR (yet?)!

I will spend extra time to revert the update now.

Any help with restoring my external disk or gaining trust in it's reliability again is obviously appreciated.

1) Photo SD cards usually prefer to be formatted in the camera after each use to erase them, or at least that’s what Canon and Nikon recommend.

2) Why did you use journaled HFS+ and especially case sensitive? For the last several releases the recommended file system has been APFS. Case sensitive HFS+, journaled or not, was always an issue as various apps and other programs were not case sensitive and expected operations to succeed regardless of case.

Not trying to defer blame, just curious as to your rationale for the above.

If your external drive is giving write errors that’s a failure of the disk hardware and has nothing to do with macOS per se.

Quite a surprise that two totally different (and anything but old) pieces of hardware decide to fail within a short time frame after the update - both being related to file system or partitioning aspects.

By posting our incidents we're collecting data points here.

Pure odds? Possible yet not very likely.

Regarding "Formatting SD Card":

When the MacBook says something like "Can't read card. Please format." it should be safe to assume that it knows to do that. So spare me the "you should rather do it in way 3 of 5 and possibly at full moon", please. Apple tries to save us from aspects that require far less technical understanding and hides details because the user "need not know". Don't even try to argue it is the user's (i.e. my) fault to accept the system's suggestion.

Plus: If it was the hardware - no point for your argument to format it in the camera. If it wasn't - why did the system not read a formerly functioning card in the first place?

Regarding the file system:

A capital letter has a different character code than a lowercase one. To the machine they're two different things. In many development projects case matters.

More important: I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CARE! Apple chose not to support several other file systems and to offer HFS. If they offer it they need to work it correctly and not brick my drive after a system update.

Any arguments about that being the user's responsibility will not receive an answer from my side.

Will only respond to (and appreciate) helpful hints from here.

Best regards and carpe diem.

I didn’t say the SD card failed, but rather most camera vendors recommend you format them in the camera. Theoretically there shouldn’t be a difference but I always format mine in my camera and have never had an issue.

The drive may have had a hardware issue; write failures usually are an indication of a hardware fault rather than software.

Yes, upper case is different from lower case, but for decades the Mac file system didn’t differentiate and many applications got used to that. In particular, Adobe apps used to be problematic as sometimes they would refer to a file in lower case, sometimes all caps and sometimes mixed case and they expected them all to access the same file.

You can use upper case and yell all you like as to how you want things to work, but I’m describing how things actually work.

You can feel free to accept my facts or not, it doesn’t change reality.

I am NOT using third party Disk Management Software by the way.