- Joined
- Sep 30, 2007
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- The Republic of Neptune
- Your Mac's Specs
- 2019 iMac 27"; 2020 M1 MacBook Air; macOS up-to-date... always.
I recently discovered I was being afflicted by those permissions issues that reportedly had been plaguing Leopard since its release. I had all kinds of crazy things scattered around, like permissions for "Other" to read/write; myself or "Other" with "custom" permissions; myself listed twice; and on and on. Running "Repair Permissions" didn't help. It's entirely possible it made things worse. I had a couple apps that wouldn't run. My "Data" drive, which holds my Time Machine backups plus some TV shows, music, and such, was completely overrun with the bad permissions, starting at the root of the drive. I tried to delete some TM backups... they wouldn't delete, though I got no error messages or such. I tried a couple terminal commands I knew of to retake ownership... no dice. Trying to modify the permissions via the "Get Info" panel wouldn't work. In the case of the "Others"... they simply would not delete. Nor anything with "Custom" permissions.
I finally decided to wipe OS X off and start fresh. And rather than migrate my users back, I'd carefully copy back over only what I HAD to (documents, bookmarks, etc). Well in the process of doing this, I find out I'm no longer a member of the admin group, but "staff". THAT threw me for a loop... then I read that this change was normal in Leopard, though I never saw it before now. I think that, despite doing a "clean" install the first time, when I migrated my users, the existing group stuck. Odd... though now I think that little change coupled with the migration had much to do with the problems that arose.
Anywho.. despite being careful, I found the permissions issues started creeping back in. And I had yet to figure out what to do about my Data drive. NOW I'm really ticked off! So I did a little searching on VersionTracker, and found a couple utilities that completely saved the day! First one was ACL Fix. This handy little utility stripped off the permissions for any folder I selected (and all its contents if I desired) and reset them to what should be the appropriate ones. Within seconds, I had fixed the folder/files that had the "bad" permissions creep back in. Oh if only I had found this BEFORE reinstalling! Next tool was iRepair. This lets you change the ownership and group permissions very very easily.
Unfortunately even those utilities couldn't help my Data drive, presumably because the bad permissions started from the root of that drive. It may have been further complicated by the immense size of the Time Machine backup folder also. Anywho... I backed up my media to my other drives (thankfully I had the space, AND moving them to the other drives auto-fixed their permissions) and formatted the Data drive. Moved everything back, used iRepair to set some permissions to my liking, and all is good!
At any rate, I hope this experience will come in handy to someone. I simply can't recommend those 2 utilities in particular highly enough... they should be in everyone's arsenal!
I finally decided to wipe OS X off and start fresh. And rather than migrate my users back, I'd carefully copy back over only what I HAD to (documents, bookmarks, etc). Well in the process of doing this, I find out I'm no longer a member of the admin group, but "staff". THAT threw me for a loop... then I read that this change was normal in Leopard, though I never saw it before now. I think that, despite doing a "clean" install the first time, when I migrated my users, the existing group stuck. Odd... though now I think that little change coupled with the migration had much to do with the problems that arose.
Anywho.. despite being careful, I found the permissions issues started creeping back in. And I had yet to figure out what to do about my Data drive. NOW I'm really ticked off! So I did a little searching on VersionTracker, and found a couple utilities that completely saved the day! First one was ACL Fix. This handy little utility stripped off the permissions for any folder I selected (and all its contents if I desired) and reset them to what should be the appropriate ones. Within seconds, I had fixed the folder/files that had the "bad" permissions creep back in. Oh if only I had found this BEFORE reinstalling! Next tool was iRepair. This lets you change the ownership and group permissions very very easily.
Unfortunately even those utilities couldn't help my Data drive, presumably because the bad permissions started from the root of that drive. It may have been further complicated by the immense size of the Time Machine backup folder also. Anywho... I backed up my media to my other drives (thankfully I had the space, AND moving them to the other drives auto-fixed their permissions) and formatted the Data drive. Moved everything back, used iRepair to set some permissions to my liking, and all is good!
At any rate, I hope this experience will come in handy to someone. I simply can't recommend those 2 utilities in particular highly enough... they should be in everyone's arsenal!