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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
  • 1,550

2 Answers2

52

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
  • 668
  • 7
  • 8
-3

  • 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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