Can I cancel encryption in process? Made mistake

[Rita]

I have a new 5 TB Seagate drive I selected full disk encryption with data in place. The estimated time is 5 days and I would like to cancel this but with no cancel button I fear I would lose drive operation. Is there a way to just nix this and start again without losing/damaging anything? If so what do I do to account for the 10% completion?

I know now I should have selected to wipe instead of keeping data in place or have just made a folder. Im at 10%

Alternatively, if I can not stop this, can I select defer and unplug both my computer and hard drive so I can stick these devices in another location. I can not leave my laptop open at work for 5 days straight. Thanks for any help.

[Rita]

FYI: When doing a search for "cancel" there are many posts asking for the feature but no answers on if it can be aborted, how, and what to do after to restore to previous state. This would help not only for my situation but for future and past cases which search for cancel and not want to bother community with a new question. :)

Also, it remains unclear if one could unplug a portable hard drive with defer option or if thats just a computer. The note on hard drive not being bootable does have me hesitate on unplugging both.

[CharonM72]

It looks like you can stop and undo encryption by defering the encryption, and then when resuming it, select "decrypt" instead of "encrypt" and it will decrypt everything that was encrypted. I just tried it on a drive and after decryption, it mounted successfully and appears to be fine as far as I can tell.

[onlywebmail]

I have the same problem.

I decrypted an 8TB disk, which took 2 days, which was hard, but OK.
I did this, as i used a tripple encryption scheme and i wanted to change this to straight AES instead.

But now, the re-encryption takes 8 days, EIGHT!

How can that be?

Encryption and decryption should take roughtly the same time, i would expect.
The CPU is capable of handling it and reading and writing the blocks is the same.

So, how can that take 4 times as long?

It will be faster to decrypt, save everything on a second disk, encrypt the disk and then copy stuff back!

Is this a mistake, a bug?

[onlywebmail]

OMG.

I chose "Defer" and then selected the partition again to use "permantly decrypt".

This leads to the following message:

Operation failed due to one or more of the following:

• Incorrect password (it is correct!)
• Incorrect Volume PIM number (i did not use one!)
• Incorrect PRF (hash) (i used both autodetect and sha-512 which i used)
• Not a valid volume (it is the same partion that i chose for the encryption!)

:-O

[onlywebmail]

I tried everything, copied the password straight from KeePass, tried the whole disk instead of the partition ...

Nwo i try to reboot, maybe this helps.

I am short of a massive panic.

[Enigma2Illusion]

My understanding for decrypting is that VeraCrypt only decrypts the data and not the entire partition/drive since new unencrypted data will overwrite the empty encrypted space.

Hence, that is why decrypting was faster than encrypting your 8TB drive/partition again. Also it depends which wipe option you selected can greatly impact the amount of time to encrypt a drive/partition.

Can you provide the following information?

What brand and model is your PC?
What version of VeraCrypt?
Which hash algorithm?
Which encryption algorithm or cascade algorithm?
What version of Windows? (Click on the lower left Windows icon, type winver and then hit return)
Was your PC using MBR or UEFI for the OS?

There may be issues with certain PC makers or models that is causing the failure of defer option to properly resume. The more information we can provide to the developer, the better.

[onlywebmail]

Hello,
this is not some "brand".

Am am trying to give all information:

It is a PC build on a Asus P8C WS motherboard and a Intel Xeon E3-1245 CPU.
VeraCrypt is at 1.22 64 Bit and Windows 10 Pro at version 1803.

I used the SHA-512 hash and wanted to re-encrypt the partition with AES.
I cannot tell, if i used MBR or UEFI.

I have an unencrypted system disk with Windows 10 and 3 partitions, the 8 TB disk that i tried to reencrypt and an RAID of two 2 TB disks that are also encrypted with VeryCrypt.

[onlywebmail]

I rebooted the PC and then VeraCrypt ask if i want to continue.
After that, it came up with the following popup:

[onlywebmail]

I am not sure what to choose there.

I had started the new AES encryption and then choose "defer" after i realized that this would take 8 days.

After that, i tried to decrypt the device again - to be able to use it unencrypted again.
But this never worked, so most probably, choosing "encrypt" would be the best (even if that takes 8 days).

But i fear one of the choices will be BAD, destroying my data.

It is confusing, that Very Crypt does not know which process can be continued.
It´s like russian roulette for me now :-O