Stopping Apple Time Machine Encryption

When setting up a hard drive for Apple Time Machine backups in OS X or macOS, if you enable the  encryption option the drive may perform this incredibly slowly, sometimes taking days to encrypt even a small percentage of the drive.  

Provided you are running a version of the operating system from 10.9 or newer (Mavericks through to Big Sur) then you can stop the encryption process running by entering the following in Terminal and save your hard drive from failing due to continuous access.

diskutil cs revert /Volumes/drive_name -passphrase

To find the drive_name then type diskutil list and use the Volume name. 

When you enter the command you will be prompted to enter the passphrase you set when enabling the encryption.

Apple OS X controlling sleep mode

You can use the Energy Saver setting in the System preferences in OS X but you may find that the system still manages to invoke a power saving mode, this is especially painful when you require the machine to be fully up for an extended time, for example when running your first synchronisation of cloud storage. So to control the sleep functions of OS X there is a nice terminal command CAFFEINATE, this can be used to keep all aspects of the system live.

For example typing caffeinate -i -d will prevent the system and hard drive from sleeping. When you do not need to have the machine running fully you just CTRL Z the terminal window and quit terminal.

If you go to the following link you will find the help page for this command, https://ss64.com/osx/caffeinate.html.