I cloned my APFS volume to an external drive, and the external was MacOS Extended (Journaled). Assuming that this is the same as HFS (and I don't know that), it might be possible to clone back to convert the internal to HFS.

Just a suggestion...


Jon

macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365