Q: FileVault stuck on "Encryption Paused"

An update on my situation. Since I am entitled to 90 days of Apple Care Support with my new MBP Retina, I tried again to contact the technical support line today. After spending 20 mins in a queue I was pleased to be looked after by a patient and helpful person. He took me through all the usual routines - reset the SMC, reset PRAM, and he asked me to perform a process very similar to Scafede's. Nothing worked - Encryption remained paused. His conclusion was it was likely a bug in the installation process of OSX and suggested I do a Time Machine backup and then erase the main partition and reinstall OSX. I decided to try this. I also decided I would enable FileVault Encryption again in the installation. I watched anxiously and patiently as the process neared completion. I am happy to report that encryption completed successfully, so those of you who have been unsure of trying this - perhaps this will encourage you.

I have been a windows / android user from the beginning.  About a month ago I got an iPhone 6 Plus and have liked it so much I decided to buy a MacBook Pro 15 with retina display.  Yesterday evening I took it out of the box and powered it up using the default settings.  As has been previously discussed here, the FileVault is on by default.  You have to uncheck it during setup to avoid it.  Needless to say, I encountered the same hangup everyone else has.  I stayed up most of the night trying every suggestion mentioned in this thread.  Nothing worked.  Chat support was unavailable.  My support request had me choose a time for a support specialist to call me back.  The earliest available is this afternoon.  I bit the bullet and erased the startup disk and reinstalled the OSX this morning.  It was about a 45 minute process.  During setup I made certain to uncheck the FileVault option.  All appears well now.  I must admit, with all of the praise I've heard over many years about all things Apple, this incident was a real blow to my confidence.  How on earth could something this significant not be addressed in some way by now?  I never thought I would ever drop $2,700 for a laptop in my life.  Let alone stay up most of the night and half the next day trying to resolve an issue created by a bug inherent in the default settings of the setup routine.  Just unbelievable.

Hedgewig,

Did you do the Time Machine backup onto the internal HD, or an external drive?  Would you mind providing a more detailed list of steps?

It seems that you're saying that I can -- from this paused encryption state -- create my first ever Time Machine backup.  Then I can wipe the drive and use that backup to restore my files, but it won't bring back the broken FileVault problem.  Is that correct?

Hi _ps

Here are the instructions you will need for Time Machine and how to erase and reinstall OSX:

Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support

OS X Yosemite: Erase and reinstall OS X

I suggest you use an external drive for Time Machine as I did.

Before this you might want to follow Scafede's process as covered earlier in this thread. Apparently this alone has worked for some people, and Apple Support basically asked me to follow the same process. 

Of course I can't guarantee this will work for you but it was what Apple Support recommended for me and it worked for me.

I am also seeing this on a brand new MacBook Pro.  On start up I decided to enable FileVault and now it's stuck with the message about needing the power connected.  I've tried the different recommendations.  I did kick-start it by booting into recovery mode and checking the volume, etc., but I also managed to get it to temporarily start by rebooting.  In the end it goes back to being paused.  Performance is not impacted. 

Someone mentioned doing running diagnostics and seeing a report that the power supply was faulty.  How do I do that?  I'd love to see what comes up.

I would like to know what shows up also, I'm the one who found that mine shows a problem with the power supply.  This is how you run the hardware diagnostic, shut down your Mac, now push the power button and press and hold the "d" key until it powers up and show the diagnostic screen. You can find the complete instructions searching for Apple hardware test. 

So I ran the hardware tests and it came back saying that there were no problems.

I may do a re-install, but right now I'm waiting to backup what I've done so far (i.e. apps installed, data copied over) to a Time Capsule.  It's taking forever.  24hrs to do 60GB!!.   I don't have a spare external drive to back up to right now.  Anyway, I'll wait.  It's not my primary machine.

All said though, I do hope that Apple will come up with a fix for this pretty sharpish.  It's a bit shoddy really.

Just spent over £2.5k on a new Retina Macbook Pro with fastest CPU and 1TB HD.

I used the default ON settings for FileVault during setup and it hang for around 45 minutes before proceeding to the next step.

Once everything was up and running I noticed the encryption paused message despite having the power line connected.

Tried everything mentioned in this thread and have now resorted to reinstalling OS X.

After having using windows PC's and other systems since 1980 (ZX80) I decided to finally jump ship and join Apple with this laptop.

I have to say that so far this is a very dismal start. I've now lost all faith I had in this company. They ship a brand new top of the range laptop with software that does not work, and by reading these forums they've known about it for a while.

That's similar to me - this MBP was just over £2k and we do expect not to have this sort of issue.  To be fair, it's the first time I've seen this sort of thing (this is my fifth Mac).  Having said that, I've never turned FileVault on - I'm not sure what possessed me to do it, other than OS X recommended that I do (I don't remember this when upgrading my other two Macs which don't have it turned on).  It does make sense to use FileVault on a laptop though.  Let's hope it gets fixed soon.  Right now I'm not seeing performance issues.  When it did kick off again, it was completing the Optimisation before going back to the paused state, so I think it had completed what it needed to do initially.  Whether subsequent changes to the volume are impacted, I know not.

On a related note, someone posted a link to file bugs with Apple in an earlier post.  However, you need to be a member of the developer programme, which I am not.  Anyone got a link for the rest of us plebs to file a report (for it to be ignored, because Apple know best and I'm clearly using my MacBook Pro wrong!)?

Brand new MBA 11". During initial setup, the thing froze on this "Encryption Paused" thing. Yes, the mac was charged up, yes the power cable was in it, yes the green light was on. No nothing progressed. The computer was empty, but iCloud had bough over some settings and calendar entries (no files).

The initial consultation with the online Apple support facility, suggested leaving it to run for 24 hours. It was no further ahead by the next evening. The next online support guy was stumped, and given this was a brand new mac setup, acquiesced and let us go back to the store it was bought from some three days before.

In that store, we got a new machine, as the original 11" locked up in front of the GeniusBar guy and that was that - we got a replacement machine. It's set up now (with FileVault on), but we had other MigrationAssistant teething troubles.

Brand new Retina MBP 13" here and had the same issues as above.  Initially turned on filevault last week when I first set it up and it has never completed despite a lot of the above fixes.  

Finally bit the bullet, did a time machine back up, full erase and reinstalled Yosemite from scratch this time turning off FileVault during the installation and then restored from my time machine backup and it looks like it's still off.

Update:

Chatted with a support specialist the afternoon of the day I restored everything to its original state and setup without FileVault.  The specialist confirmed they are aware of the issue and complimented me on my resolution to the problem.  Every new machine should have a red flag slapped on the box with a WARNING of this issue.  Very unprofessional.

Brand New, was stuck on "Connect power adapter to resume encryption."

MBAIR 11.6/1.7/8/256FLASH-USA

* Disk Util

* Erase Journaled

* Reinstall Yosemite takes forever, leave overnight

* When prompted during setup unchecked File Vault

* Immediately once logged in went to system preferences and turned on File Vault, it rebooted, on reboot I opened system preferences and just watched...

* Encryption Finished.

I did the Time Machine Backup > Erase > Reinstall > Restore process.  I chose to load the backup data *during* the installation, and when everything was done, FileVault was off.  I confirmed this via Terminal.

Note that it never asked me to enable or disable FileVault after I told the installer to restore from Time Machine.

You restored it, I did a fresh install of Yosemite since my mac was brand new which takes you through the setup process.