Filevault: does encrypting an external usb hard disk work for you?

[junkw]

diskutil apfs encryptVolume disk3s1 -user disk
Passphrase for the new "Disk" user (ABC-xxx):
Repeat passphrase:
Starting background encryption with the new "Disk" crypto user on disk3s1
The new "Disk" user will be the only one who has initial access to disk3s1
The new APFS crypto user UUID will be (ABC-xxx
Error starting encryption of APFS Volume: APFS Volume encryption failed to begin (-69596)

it was working on Mojave...

 

[Weaselboy]

Can't you just format the USB drive to APFS encrypted with Disk Utility? That works for me.

 

[junkw]

problem is Carbon Copy cloner does not support copying to Catalina APFS crypted so I need to do to in order: 1) copy to disk with CCC 2) encrypt

as they state on CCC site:
Encrypted volumes and APFS volume groups
CCC cannot create an APFS volume group using an encrypted APFS volume. When you select a Catalina+ startup disk as a source and an encrypted volume as a destination, CCC will disallow the selection and suggest that you erase or decrypt the destination volume. r

 

[Weaselboy]

I use CCC and formatted my external to APFS encrypted and it works fine. It just won't be a bootable clone is all. My plan is should I ever need to restore from a CCC clone, I would command-option-r boot to Internet recovery, then format the internal drive, then mount/unlock the CCC clone drive with Disk Util, then use Disk Util to restore the CCC drive to the internal.

CCC docs. don't tell you how to do this, because they want you have a bootable clone, but it will work for backup purposes.

There is a CCC doc that explains how to clone an APFS drive then boot to it and turn on FileVault. If you want a bootable clone, that should work for you.

 

[junkw]

thanks it worked I now have a bootable crypted ssd