Time Machine Encrypting Encryption stuck at 0%

I had an issue with two full backups remaining on the USB-C 4Tb drive I had connected directly to my iMac Pro, so I used Disk Utility to erase the drive and reformatted it with Mac Extended Journaled / GUID partitions. The backups have worked fine, all done, but the encryption remains at 0% for days.

iMac Pro

Posted on Jan 23, 2020 8:39 AM

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18 replies

Feb 13, 2020 4:32 AM in response to CromeYellow

It's been less than a week and encryption is close to 80%

CromeYellow Author

Level 1

59 points

Feb 7, 2020 7:36 AM in response to alekseyfromsan francisco

However, this "bug" seems to appear only with a USB-C drive connected directly to the iMac Pro - I have two time capsules connected along the way in my network and a 3Tb external hard drive connected directly to one of the time capsules via USB-A, and neither time capsule nor the other external USB-A drive exhibit this behavior. All the backups on the other devices are also encrypted and do not seem to exhibit this behavior of getting "stuck" at the % if encryption.

By the way, another issue I observed, was that when a USB-C external drive is connected to a time capsule via a USB-C to USB-A adapter, the entire time machine process freezes on the time capsule itself - so the heart of this issue may have to do with an inability of the time machine software to communicate properly across USB-C.

The question on the USB-C drive is whether the encryption itself is being held up or just the monitoring of the encryption progress. Because I was hearing something going on within the USB-C drive (encryption sounds?) even when there was no backup in progress, and now I hear nothing, I do assume that encryption is long complete and that it was probably a "reporting of progress" issue versus that encryption simply wasn't happening. But in my case, if I hadn't done the repeated disk first aids and restarts I don't think my encryption progress would have moved past 0%.

Only other thought I had - I am running an iMac Pro and I notice that the 4Tb SSD on this is APFS encrypted. However, since I am running Mojave 10.14.6 and have not moved on to Catalina yet on this particular machine, I chose to format the external USB-C drive with Mac Extended Journaled / GUID before the Time Machine backup and encryption.

Feb 7, 2020 2:53 PM in response to CromeYellow

I disconnected the HDD, then connected it a few hours later and now it shows me "Encrypting..." again starting from the same position. There is no backup yet. There is something badly wrong with Time Machine.

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Time Machine Encrypting Encryption stuck at 0%