Using Elements as back up drive

G'Daye,

I am new to the forum and have less than zero, well maybe not that low, Techo knowledge!!

I have been backing up on my WD Elements for over a year now and all of a sudden a error message comes up " cannot back up as disk is read only. So I sapped the Elements for a WD Passport, formatted and backed up. all was good, back up worked, THEN Error message, Cannot write to file as read only!!!

I checked the info and sure enough the drive is read only but I could not change it?

Screen shots attached and if anyone can help I will really appreciate it,

Cheers

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

No screen shots attached? And we need more info: Year and Model of your Mac and which version of OS X you're using? You say you've been backing up; which backup program are you using?

Yep, told you I was not techo, could not load the screen shots!!

Running IMac 27 Inch Mid 2010
OSX 10.10.1
Intel I5
and 16 GB Ram

Using time machine to back up, will now try to load screen shots, Ok it is not happening what do i need to do?

Many thanks for taking the time to respond,

most likely its a locked file on your main drive that cannot be backed up using time machine you need to right click all folders and select get info and look at the bottom where it says sharing and permissions give full control to your user account

Chances are that the drive is formatted for PCs in a format called NTFS, and that the Mac cannot (and has never) written to it. Simple fix; reformat the drives for Mac using Disk Utility, then use Time Machine to create an all-new master backup and away you go.

Elvarko . . . there is probably an easier way to post screen shots, but what I do when I am ready to post is GO ADVANCED>type your reply>click on the paperclip>attach the screen shot which yor Mac automatically stores on your desktop. I have to expand the attachment window to be able to see everything needed to attach the screenshot.

Thanks Dogbreath will give that a go now. Chas_m the drive was formatted by disk utility, also I think that a Gremlin has taken a hold of my Mac, continuously crashes, perhaps time to call in the experts??