Filevault Error

First thing, make sure you have enough space on your hard drive for two copies of everything in your user account. To remove encryption, Filevault needs to copy all your files, and then deletes the encrypted part.

You could make another user account that doesn't use Filevault, transfer all your files and settings over, and then delete the old user account that does use Filevault. Not sure as i don't use Filevault.

Unless you are afraid of people getting at your computer, I would suggest putting sensitive items in encrypted disk images instead of using Filevault. Filevault is pretty buggy and slow as far as I know.

 

FileVault is pretty good

He's right about the space issue. If you're on a Laptop, it's pretty common to run with almost the whole drive full, so you'd have to move data out of the Encrypted home folder before you could decrypt the rest. Copy things like your Music and Pictures to an external drive if you have one. If not, then it's a bit trickier.

The /Users/Shared folder is outside of your home folder. You can create a new folder there and then copy things out until your disk is full. Then delete the original that you've copied from. Then log out so OS X can recover space in the Encrypted file (your entire home folder is a single encrypted file that needs compacted to reclaim space when you delete stuff). Then repeat this again until you have more free space available on your Macintosh HD then your Home folder takes up (right click and get info to find out).

Aside from this, FileVault does have a couple minor issues, but it's an extremely good security option if you need one. Nothing else comes close w/o getting a whole lot more complicated. (for Windows, Linux, or Mac).

Wm