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I chose a 1T external drive for time machine and checked the "encrypt backups" option. I thought it will only encrypt the backups, but as it seems it is now encrypting the whole drive which has quite some data on it and is not SSD ;). Is there a way to cancel the encryption process? I turned off Time Machine and chose another drive for it.

Vitaly Kushner
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    Whatever you do, let the process finish, **backup everything**, then tinker with the settings. If you mess up while your files are encrypted, you are royally screwed. – Thomas Aug 15 '12 at 00:22
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    This is my only real complaint with OSX. Once the process is started some machines basically become unusable. It shouldn't be this easy to render my workstation unusable for the next 3 days: This is OSX and it's not Linux, they are supposed to be protecting me from myself. Until now I've never thought twice about clicking a dialog in OSX. Thanks Apple. – Nathan C. Tresch Sep 30 '12 at 23:56

2 Answers2

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Yes, in 10.9+ you can roll it back while its busy encrypting

diskutil cs revert /Volumes/title_drive -passphrase

You will then be promted with the OS X password unlock/decrypt dialog. After that it starts decrypting. The title_drive you can look up with diskutil list or ls -al /Volumes

Check the status with

diskutil cs list

Look for "Conversion Progress" and check if "Conversion Direction:" is set to "backward"

Sanne
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  • What if I forgot my passphrase? :-/ Guess I will have to unplug the drive and wipe the GPT on a Linux box... :) – Lester Cheung May 19 '15 at 12:24
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    If you have a bootable usb key you could run disk utility and delete the disk partition there and repartition it. But of course you lose all data. I don't know if the rescue partition is accessible without unlocking the drive, I thought FF2 was full disk encryption instead of only individual partitions. – Sanne May 19 '15 at 16:00
  • Thanks - went with the Linux route because it's an external drive. Cheers! – Lester Cheung May 20 '15 at 11:32
  • @Sanne Yes, the recovery partition is available without unlocking the system disk (partition). The `Apple_Boot` partition is separate and does not require unlocking. – Christopher Schultz Dec 27 '15 at 05:10
  • This didn't work for me -- I got the error "Error: -69750: Unable to modify a FileVault context". Any idea what went wrong? – Chill2Macht May 18 '16 at 17:44
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    @William Too late for you, I know, but I had the same problem and managed a fix: open Disk Utility; first aid the partition; open a new System Preferences window; navigate to FileVault; disconnect and reconnect power cable. The panel should now say 'Decrypting...' – yellow-saint Jul 01 '16 at 23:20
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    It no longer works for macOS High Sierra. – Dmitry Semenyuk Jan 05 '18 at 19:51
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    My status was Pending and progress was Paused. Rebooting got things going again. – Ryan H. Mar 31 '18 at 17:50
  • If your drive is using APFS, which in 2023 it likely is you need to use `apfs` instead of `cs`. You can tell this is the case if nothing shows for `diskutil cs list`. So the last command is `diskutil apfs list` for example. @DmitrySemenyuk – this_josh Apr 06 '23 at 07:49
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  • Restart.

  • Then reset pram with option+cmd+p+r.

  • Booting with cmd+r the utility disc (I have a macintosh HD and one partition encrypted (the one with encoding paused)) >select the partition encrypted>click file and unlock>repair the partition disk>repair permission on partition>repair Macintosh HD. Restart.

  • The encryption will be resumed.

Giacomo1968
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Aaqib
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