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JoeStrummer

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 27, 2019
32
1
South Africa
I am running 10.13 on a 2012 MacPro5.1 tower.

Part of the instructions to upgrade to a metal-capable GPU and then Mojave include the need to turn FireVault off. Not knowing any better I innocently navigated to FileVault. It was off. Out of curiosity, and not knowing any better, I clicked 'Turn On', assuming there would be more information about what in involved. Little did I know that it would start an encrytion process that is impossible to stop or cancel. That was 3 days ago. The encryption has crawled to 50%. I am assuming that after another couple days it will have crawled to 100%. Then another week to decrypt (turn off)

Only after clicking on the button did I discover that there is no way to stop, pause, cancel, revert etc.

None of the suggested Terminal commands to stop or revert work.

I use my machine is a busy production environment, I was planning on upgrading the GPU and OS over the weekend. Now I have to wait a week (with luck) because I clicked on an option in System Preferences before doing careful online research? WTF?

The boot drive it is encrypting is 256gb SSD with 160gb free space.
 
Do you have a backup? Time Machine? Carbon Copy Cloner? If you have a good backup, power down and restore from your backup. Otherwise you're going to have to wait it out.
 
Do you have a backup? Time Machine? Carbon Copy Cloner? If you have a good backup, power down and restore from your backup. Otherwise you're going to have to wait it out.
[doublepost=1548677877][/doublepost]Thanks for this, yes I have a Time Machine backup. I will probably restore from there as you suggest.
Just seems crazy, insane and baffling to me that clicking on an innocent-looking button in System Preferences locks my machine into a week-long process, that is visibly slowing down my machine. No warning, no information, no option to pause or cancel or stop or escape!
 
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After 3 days progress of FileVault encryption on a 256GB SSD had crawled to 57 percent. I gave up and restored the drive from Time Machine. Lost a couple days work but better that waitng a week for the thing to finish.
Seems crazy to me
 
I am running 10.13 on a 2012 MacPro5.1 tower.

Part of the instructions to upgrade to a metal-capable GPU and then Mojave include the need to turn FireVault off. Not knowing any better I innocently navigated to FileVault. It was off. Out of curiosity, and not knowing any better, I clicked 'Turn On', assuming there would be more information about what in involved. Little did I know that it would start an encrytion process that is impossible to stop or cancel. That was 3 days ago. The encryption has crawled to 50%. I am assuming that after another couple days it will have crawled to 100%. Then another week to decrypt (turn off)

Only after clicking on the button did I discover that there is no way to stop, pause, cancel, revert etc.

None of the suggested Terminal commands to stop or revert work.

I use my machine is a busy production environment, I was planning on upgrading the GPU and OS over the weekend. Now I have to wait a week (with luck) because I clicked on an option in System Preferences before doing careful online research? WTF?

The boot drive it is encrypting is 256gb SSD with 160gb free space.
Ironic. That exact same thing happened to me last summer. I learned patience I never knew possible
 
Filevault is not supported in Mojave anymore on MacPros. It's sad but true. Sorry you went through the frustration of that. There was an email on one of the threads in the Mac Pro forum from Craig Frederighi stating that it has been retired on the MacPros moving forward. Surprised it was so slow under High Sierra which apparently supports it and glad you had a backup to restore from.
 
This is an example as to why I -NEVER- encrypt my drives (with only one exception -- a small backup I keep in my car)...
 
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