I’ve been having problems with the Carbonite backup on my wife’s laptop and it turned out that FileVault had been enabled (not by her, I gather this is a fairly common MacOS problem).
I need to decrypt the files for Carbonite to back them up, but the decryption has been happening for about 24 hours now and it still says “more than a day remaining.”
The problem is that my wife uses this computer every day for work. So I might need to stop the decryption by tomorrow AM. Is this possible? Can I then resume decryption of the remaining files?
Or, can she use the computer while decryption is in process? I haven’t wanted to try doing anything else because I don’t want to mess anything up.
She can still use the computer while it’s decrypting, but be prepared for everything to be a bit laggy. As you’ve learned, it can be a slow process depending on how old the Mac is, HDD vs. SSD, and how much data there is.
FWIW, it’s pretty unlikely that she or someone else didn’t allow FileVault to be enabled in the first place. It’s not a common mac OS problem. She had to either explicitly enter the admin password to enable it or, since by default it’s enabled when setting up a new Mac, she just didn’t uncheck the box to turn it off when she set her Mac up for the first time.
Watch out when Apple wishes to update your operating system…I was on the phone with them for over an hour and was told Firevault is automatically checked when the update is done. You need to uncheck the box to disable it. Common problem and a nusiance according to the Apple rep.