How could I have gone about this better?

[LarryJoe33]

I upgraded to PB4 yesterday and ran into some trouble when I enabled FileVault as suggested. I never used it before. Unfortunately I got a permanent beach ball and the system rebooted. I was left with “only 1 minute remaining” in terms of encryption. It’s was doing nothing and some terminal commands said 0%. It’s was stuck. After leaving it for 14 hours or so and realizing I not could use TM or install another future update until it finished (doing nothing) and knowing it never would, I restored an image using CCC prior to the upgrade. I also TM’d before the upgrade.

Unfortunately for some season I did not have a High Sierra recovery volume on the CCC image, so when it transferred I still had no recovery HD. CCC was unable to create one. I gave up and decided to restore Sierra and work my way back up.

I installed Sierra from a June 30 CCC image and then upgraded to High Sierra. Interesting that going straight to PB4 from Sierra there was no APFS check box but it automatically converted my HFS drive to APFS.

I just started using TM a few days ago and have never been through a restore or recovery. So at this point I have a June 30 profile of my system using PB4. I decide to restore from TM to get back to yesterday. I boot into recovery mode, pop in my TM backup drive, go into TM and restore from yesterday’s TM.

It tells me my drive will be erased and replaced with the restore? I’m now really confused.

Before this I had thought from reading up on TM was that it wasn’t an image and it wasn’t bootable. I thought it just replaced files(system and data) with newer ones. I assumed you had to restore a TM backup to the same OS it was created on. This is why I got my system back to High Sierra before restoring with TM. And also because I had no recovery volume.

Was there an easier more direct way to do this (without a High Sierra recovery volume)? I’m wiping out all the restores I did to be able to restore from TM.

Spent the entire day on this and I feel like there was an easier way?
[doublepost=1502315098][/doublepost]Lesson learned here, I NEED to have a recovery HD backup. If I had a High Sierra recovery HD I could have used TM 24 hours ago.

 

[sbuntin]

You could have done a backup before installing any public beta.

 

[mikecwest]

Also, when I installed Filevault, it took forever to finish, an sat 1 minute remaining the entire time. It took nearly 1 week, and I believe it only encrypts while you are plugged in to the wall.

There is a terminal command (I believe it is 'sudo fdesetup status' ) that will present a percentage of completion.

I can tell you as well, the more files you have on your drive,the longer it will take.

 

[LarryJoe33]

You could have done a backup before installing any public beta.

I did. Read the post and try to add some value or don’t post.
[doublepost=1502326814][/doublepost]

Also, when I installed Filevault, it took forever to finish, an sat 1 minute remaining the entire time. It took nearly 1 week, and I believe it only encrypts while you are plugged in to the wall.

There is a terminal command (I believe it is 'sudo fdesetup status' ) that will present a percentage of completion.

I can tell you as well, the more files you have on your drive,the longer it will take.

Thanks Mike. I ran that command in terminal and it said 0% after 16 hours.

 

[jbarley]

I just started using TM a few days ago and have never been through a restore or recovery. So at this point I have a June 30 profile of my system using PB4. I decide to restore from TM to get back to yesterday. I boot into recovery mode, pop in my TM backup drive, go into TM and restore from yesterday’s TM.

It tells me my drive will be erased and replaced with the restore? I’m now really confused.

Before this I had thought from reading up on TM was that it wasn’t an image and it wasn’t bootable. I thought it just replaced files(system and data) with newer ones. I assumed you had to restore a TM backup to the same OS it was created on.

Time Machine backups themselves are not bootable. But You can restore a fully bootable system from your TM backups.
Time Machine can fully restore a system to exactly the same state as it was the time and day the backup was created if you so choose.
And because the backups were all done previously to the system you are restoring to all the files and data will be older, not newer.
Migration Assistant can also access your TM backups and bring data and files over to an already installed system.

 

[LarryJoe33]

Time Machine backups themselves are not bootable. But You can restore a fully bootable system from your TM backups.
Time Machine can fully restore a system to exactly the same state as it was the time and day the backup was created if you so choose.
And because the backups were all done previously to the system you are restoring to all the files and data will be older, not newer.
Migration Assistant can also access your TM backups and bring data and files over to an already installed system.

Thanks, unfortunately when the TM restore finished, the drive would not boot. I was left with a circle with a slash through it when I tried to restart. The drive looked ok and seemed to have the right folders and size. Not a great first experience with TM trying a full system restore. Maybe its a beta /APFS thing?

 

[mikecwest]

I did. Read the post and try to add some value or don’t post.
[doublepost=1502326814][/doublepost]
Thanks Mike. I ran that command in terminal and it said 0% after 16 hours.

Yeah, my did as well. It is VERY slow.....after a few days to got up to about 24% and it seemed to speed up after that. I felt almost like it was not encrypting while the computer was asleep, but I might be wrong. It seemed to work the fasted when I was plugged in at home, actively using the system. I was worried also, but I just let it ride out. The same thing happened with syncing iCloud photos.

 

[LarryJoe33]

Yeah, my did as well. It is VERY slow.....after a few days to got up to about 24% and it seemed to speed up after that. I felt almost like it was not encrypting while the computer was asleep, but I might be wrong. It seemed to work the fasted when I was plugged in at home, actively using the system. I was worried also, but I just let it ride out. The same thing happened with syncing iCloud photos.

Oh boy, maybe I should have just left it. It pretty much consumed my day yesterday, restoring, erasing, restoring, formatting, etc. You know the drill. At least I figured out how to do a few new things and I have a somewhat clean install.

I still haven't turned on FileVault again.

 

[LarryJoe33]

Well the good news is that I finished all my backups to my new FW800 external drive.

- imaged my install of PB4 using CCC (Carbon Copy Clone)
- copied my image of Sierra (before I took the beta plunge) using CCC (Sierra)
- TM'd my current install (Time Machine)

All if this to the new drive partitioned with HFS+ accordingly for each BU. Everything is bootable. I assume the recovery 10-12 volume below is the HS recovery volume? I hope I am pretty prepared for disaster now lol.