Proper way to enable FileVault with APFS on M.2 drive

[cdf1982]

Hi everyone!

Pretty soon I'll have my first personal hackintosh to play with but, while I have built a couple of machines before with success thanks to all the work done here, I have no experience with a lot of things I'm going to face.

The forum is helping a lot, but one question in particular is proving difficult to retrieve updated informations about: I would like to enable FileVault on my M.2 boot drive formatted with APFS; I'm planning to use UniBeast and MultiBeast, without directly manipulating the Clover configuration if possible.

A few questions:

1) Is it a bad idea, and should I avoid FileVault with hackintoshes because it introduces an additional point of possible failure? Anyone who is doing what I am planning to to reliably would like to let me know their success story?

2) If APFS FileVault on M.2 is a possibility, may I proceed as follows?
a. Format the M.2 in APFS without enabling encryption
b. Install 10.13.5 on it
c. After the installation, when everything works, enable FileVault on the main volume
d. Boot from it without issues

3) If my installation would ever fail, i.e. with future updates, would I be able to mount this FileVault encrypted APFS M.2 after booting from a different SSD?

Thanks in advance!

@cdf1982

 

[zappers]

my 2c

1.
filevault is good generally, but

2.
that's what I did and it was not the right thing to do. that's why I just did a search on "apfs fielvault" and found your post

3.
booting from another drive and mounting the apfs filevault volume? easy.
booting from the apfs filevault drive? still working on it.
turning off filevault on the apfs boot drive when booting from anther drive? still working on it.

 

[cdf1982]

2.
that's what I did and it was not the right thing to do. that's why I just did a search on "apfs fielvault" and found your post

Thanks for sharing your experience. Let's hope that someone else pitches in with a proper way to do it and help us both!

3.
booting from another drive and mounting the apfs filevault volume? easy.

The fact that you can boot from another volume and mount the APFS FileVault volume is a relief, because at least I know that I can keep a non-filevault basic system for recovery.