Safe way to cancel shrinking hard drive partition I thought it would be a good idea to create another partition on my hard drive to use as a backup. I opened disk utility and configured the internal hard drive to split half between the OS partition and the backup partition and hit go. Then it started shrinking the OS partition.

Now, several hours later, I am wondering if it will ever stop. I opened activity monitor and I can see that diskmanagementd process is reading and writing like crazy, but it is only transferring about 3 MB/s. According to my calculations (I have about 500 GB of data on it), it would take me 45 days to complete the shrinking of the drive.

Is there a safe way of cancelling the process? Will I corrupt my disk and / or data by just killing the disk utility process?
Unless there is a  Cancel button that, when pressed, gives a warning that it will revert the current action, wait it out.  

If there is no Cancel button, then you have no choice but to wait.
If you force it to stop halfway through, your data will be in an uncertain state.

BTW running a backup to the same storage medium is rather pointless... if the drive goes down it takes your backup with it.