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GPG Services: MacGPG stops decrypting large file at 32 GB

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Jason Wingfield

03 Oct, 2019 07:49 PM

I have a series of GPG files I am trying to decrypt. One is 11 GB and the MacGPG decryption works every time. The other files are around 33 to 48 GB each, and decryption stops running when the temp file is approximately 32 GB in size. After several attempts on each, none of these larger files has been successfully decrypted.

Expected
I expected the files over 33 GB to complete the decryption just like the smaller file which is 11 GB,

macOS                   10.14.6     18G95
GPG Suite               2019.1      2539    (f7527f7dd4)
GPG Mail                3.2.1       1388    (4319271f53)    30 trial days remaining
GPG Keychain            1.5         1577    (6daf90a76b)
GPG Services            1.12        1096    (17b325bb15)
MacGPG                  2.2.17      938     (cb13729b0b)
GPG Suite Preferences   2.2         1115    (f813be50a8)
Libmacgpg               1.0         920     (b50a3b4b50)
pinentry                1.1.0.1     14      (c191c4128d)

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Luke Le on 03 Oct, 2019 08:20 PM

   

   Hi Jason,

   could you quickly explain how you are decrypting these files? Using our GPG Services: right-click on file and choose Services › OpenPGP: Decrypt file. Or rather using gpg via Terminal?

   If the former, would you please try to decrypt the file via Terminal?

   gpg --decrypt --status-fd 1 path/to/file > decrypted-file
   

   That will generate some debug output which might be helpful to understand what is going wrong.

   I assume that there's plenty of disk space available to decrypt and decompress the file?

   • Edit

2. 2 Posted by Jason Wingfield... on 03 Oct, 2019 08:34 PM

   

   Hi,

   I was using GPG Services and right-clicking the files to decrypt, and my file system has over 200GB available. However, I just tried the command line on the largest 48GB file and decryption was successful!

   I used the command:

   gpg --output output_file_name.tar --decrypt input_file_name.tar.gpg

   Thanks,
    
   Jason
    

   On 2019-10-03, 2:20 PM, "Luke Le" <[email blocked]> wrote:

         CAUTION: This email is from an external source. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.

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3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Luke Le on 03 Oct, 2019 08:36 PM

   

   Interesting, thanks for the update. It is possible that macOS itself kills the service if it takes too long which might happen with such big files but we would have to test that. Did you see a particular error message or what did happen?

   • Edit

4. 4 Posted by Jason Wingfield... on 03 Oct, 2019 08:38 PM

   

   Hi Luke,

   I saw the popup dialog that the file was being decrypted, with the status bar. After the temp file reached around 32GB (after about 7 minutes) the dialog just disappeared and no error was shown. The process just stopped running. Temp files were not locked, I was able to delete and try again immediately.

   Thanks,
    
   Jason
    

   On 2019-10-03, 2:36 PM, "Luke Le" <[email blocked]> wrote:

         CAUTION: This email is from an external source. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.

   • Edit

5. Support Staff 5 Posted by Luke Le on 03 Oct, 2019 08:42 PM

   

   Ah ok. Would it be possible to retry that, but before starting the decryption process open Console.app and enter the search term GPG

   It would be interesting to learn if a concrete error message is logged, or if the process is simply killed. What you describe seems to prove my theory.

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6. Steve closed this discussion on 16 Dec, 2019 09:28 PM.