A cautionary tale
Yesterday, the 14th of February, I decided to use FileVault on my late 2013 iMac. It has the standard 1TB internal drive and a 1TB external as for Time Machine back ups. The main drive has only 177.46 GB of files on it, mostly Spanish and German language lessons. Once I triggered the use of FileVault, I found that it would take an estimated two days to complete the encryption. As I write
this, 24 hours on, it is saying “more than one day’s work remaining”. This alternates between 10 hours and one day! The real problem is that after internet searches and two calls to Apple, I now find that the process cannot be stopped and must run its course before I can turn the feature off. To make matters worse, if the machine decides to close down, as mine did last night, it’s possible to experience great difficulty trying to restart it. Thanks to MacFormat’s tips I was able to get it up and running, or at least so it appeared, and I was able to turn off the FileVault encryption. Sadly, though, that is not actually the case as, when I checked in Preferences later, FileVault was back up and running and, guess what, yes at least two days remaining. I have been locked out of the machine twice and had misleading information sent to me, in that the system said that a special unlocking key had been sent to me. To date nothing has appeared on my iPad, iPhone or the Mac itself. All this is stressful and could have been avoided had Apple put even a small warning in the setup procedure that it could take a long time and could not be cancelled until all encryption had finished.
On the plus side, I can still access all my files but if I do I suspect I am slowing it down even further. This is my only effort at work in two days. If I am unheard of again, I may be the late, desiccated skeleton next to the late 2013 Mac…
GRAHA M says… We feel your pain David, and we can only hope that by the time you read this, FileVault has actually finished. You’re correct, there’s nothing you can do to speed it up. You just need to wait for it to finish. The real question though is why you wanted to do this, as FileVault is overkill for most Mac users? And, we know you love your Mac, but surely there must be better things to do on Valentine’s Day?