Encrypt External drives

[dannyjo22]

Most of my data is on my attached External SSD's. One for Time Machine and one for all my photo's etc. Now stupidly when I set these up I didn't encrypt them. I have been looking at doing this now but some videos I watch seem to suggest I need to use disk utility which will format my drive. Another video I watched says to use finder, right click on the drive and select encrypt. Nowhere does this say that the drive will be formatted using this method.

So do I need to wipe and start again or can I just encrypt what I have?

 

[Reuben klang]

From what I recall as I had this exact issue a good few years ago you have to reformat the drive there is no way around it. Haven’t used external drives for a good number of years now that icloud has superseded it.