But under what circumstances does it do anything about it? If nobody is logged in? If there is no activity of a certain kind? Or the other way around: if disk data is accessed do it anyway and do the rest in the background, slowly? I also looked for a process to renice, but there is no obvious candidate. So, somehow the system decides that it should not do anything about it now. After reading horror stories on this taking forever, I started looking into why and into ways to speed this up.Īnd what surprised me was that the system is 98% idle. Then when I looked again a while later it said it would take 'more than one day'. It started out with saying it would take 3 hours.

I also ensured that the system doesn't go to sleep.

So, I turned it off in System Preferences. After trying multiple methods to either speed up the encryption process (which initially changed back and forth from 'estimating time remaining' to '106 days remaining') or begin decryption through recovery mode and disk utility, I'm now stuck with a FileVault decryption status that's stuck, and a near useless computer. There is a reason for me (testing) to turn off FileVault encryption on the boot drive on my Mac running macOS High Sierra (long story, off topic).

Speed up filevault decryption