In the end I also accepted that it’s not an easy process, and just backed up and reinstalled. Of course that itself isn’t the nicest process, because you have to get enough of a system working (and networking configured as such) to be able to even restore from the archive. It would be much better if you could pass the archived tgz to the installer from the get go.

There’s a lot of nice things about ClearOS, but it still has a ways to go.

Googling around, it does not seem possible. The only solution I've seen presented is to copy off all the data, reformat and then copy back in the data. This link may help if the same encryption method is used.

If it is a recent installation, perhaps a config backup (Webconfig > System > Backup > Configuration Backup and Restore), re-install and config restore may be easier. You'd need to back up your data as well.

[edit]
This could be a workaround. It seems to embed your key into the startup process, effectively defeating the purpose of the encryption.
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