Cant Delete Mac Files On External Drives

Are you unable to delete some files or folders on your Mac external drives?

Darn those Mac files that wont do as their told! I'm with ya, ain't it a pain.... Yet it is there to protect our files.

A little history...

I have been having some permissions problems on my mac in the past 6 months (long story) and just could not find a fix. Mind you I looked for hours, days even and tried many commands in terminal etc.

Mac just would not let me change permission of files I transferred in from my windows machines, even if they originated from my mac (same user) and then transferred back.

I have had this problem for months and spent hours looking for different answers. All that time it was under my nose. I tried changing permissions, adding users and some terminal commands but in the end what worked was selecting 'ignore ownership on this volume'

You can read about it here, this was the advice I followed.
Learn About Ignoring Ownership On Mac External Drives With Permission Issues

This is not a fix so much as it is a work around but it finally allowed me to access & delete files I could not before.

Be aware though, the author states on his post..

NOTE

Using ignore ownership can create problems when restoring backed-up items, especially when restoring boot volumes or when restoring items with specific ownership and permissions.

So only you can decide if this is worth a try. So far I have not had a problem but I haven't needed to restore any files yet and just have no time to test right now, so please be aware of this potential issue.



I hope it helps someone.

I enjoy my macs and also depend on many of my windows apps 'But' this almost turned me off Macs as seemed like a never ending permissions problem.

Seriously, I hope it allows you to finally fix this issue if it is eating up your productivity as it was mine.

Later,
Anthony Roger