Context: Making a new bootable backup of my 13″ M1 MBP before upgrading macOS and taking advantage of the fact that SuperDuper! 3.7 now supports bootable clones (yay!). However, one unfortunate fact of creating them is that SuperDuper! docs say you have to boot from that drive and turn on File Vault manually if you want it encrypted (you want it encrypted 😉 ).
I’m pretty sure there’s a way to do this with diskutil and whatnot instead of booting from the clone and turning it on there, but I didn’t feel up to digging through how to do that (it’s complicated by the need to add users manually before turning on encryption, is my vague memory of the steps I had to do last time I dug into this).
However, David – maker of SuperDuper! – was kind enough to mention that once you turn it on you can then boot back from your main drive and connect the backup clone and let it finish the encryption in the background (this is good because it said 10 days to complete – mine is a very slow USB external drive, apparently!).
The drive kept blinking for two days and I was trying to figure out how to tell how much progress it had made and if it was done or if spotlight was indexing the drive or what. Here are some commands that I found to help with that.
diskutil cs listwill produce a listing of Core Storage volumes and their “Encryption Status” and “Conversion Status” which will indicate complete or not.
Unfortunately, the bootable combined volume + “Data” doesn’t come up in that list (it’s something different, apparently).
So for that I was able to find what I wanted using:
diskutil apfs listwhich outputs an entry like this for the in-progress file vault encryption volume (emphasis mine):
| +-> Volume disk7s2 8C8FD74F-ACE0-4E1D-B67B-2F021A3C5DD7 | | --------------------------------------------------- | | APFS Volume Disk (Role): disk7s2 (Data) | | Name: Data (Case-insensitive) | | Mount Point: /Volumes/Data | | Capacity Consumed: 1459954380800 B (1.5 TB) | | Sealed: No | | Encryption Progress: 75.0% (Unlocked)
You can specify the container disk (which is disk 7 in this case) and see just the volumes in that container: diskutil apfs list disk7
Geek And Dad's Blog 