time machine backup and Monterey

mickfrankevans wrote:

which external hard drives work problem free with Monterey. recentley upgraded to Monterey and my two WD MyPassport drives have serious problems working with time machine.

How so ?

Format Time Machine Disk:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-can-use-with-time-machine-mh15139/mac

Back up your Mac with Time Machine

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

mickfrankevans wrote:

The WD hard disk worked perfectly with Time Machine, for about 2 years, until I upgraded to Monterey. I'm now erase and formatting the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). But I'm pondering on the scheme to use, the Guide Partition Map leaves 850GB of the 2TB used, and I cannot see where the 850GB is !

I have used multiple WD external My Passport drives with Monterey for Time Machine. Make sure you uninstall any WD drive utilities or similar software you might have installed. In Disk Utility, select View => Show All Devices. Erase the physical drive entirely, at the highest level, specify APFS and GUID. After erasing it should be empty.

Any drive should work as long as there is no drive software installed by the supplier. However any drive can have issues for various reasons. Please clarify.

A new drive with Monterey will have to be formatted APFS which it will do automatically no matter what.