MacOS Encryption – How to Stop Disk Encryption in Progress

disk-encryptionencryptionfilevaultmacostime-machine

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.

Best Answer

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"

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