unZip file. Resulting folder locked.

[Nutbolt]

Hi everyone,

not sure if I’m in the right place. But let’s see.

I found some files (JPEG’s mainly, some gifs, mp4s, et) on an old external harddrive.
Zipped them on the ext harddrive.
Transferred the zip to my desktop.
Opened and deleted the zip.
now I don’t want the folder from the zip. But when I try to delete/modify/move/rename it asks for an admin password.

I’m working on a MacBook Pro. OS Catalina

anyone know why this is happening?

thanks I’m advance for any help offered.

 

[IWT]

A warm welcome to Mac-Forums and thank you for your post.

When you are asked for your Admin PW, and you input it, what happens?

And can you open and view all the JPEGs etc that you transferred to your Mac?

I'm asking these questions partly for clarification and partly because I wonder if there are permission issues.

Ian

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Not sure why, but you likely have to change ownership of the files to you.

 

[IWT]

I agree, Aswhin, exactly what I was getting at. The OP needs to answer the questions to take this forward.

Ian

 

[Nutbolt]

Thanks for the quick reply guys. And the welcome

So I’m not the admin user, so I can’t put in the pw. i can open the files but can’t overwrite them.

I can’t change ownership because I’m not admin.

I’m more interested in whythis has happened in the first place. My ITdept is really slow so I want to avoid this happening again.

what d’you reckon?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

The files are not owned by you to begin with. It belongs to a group that you also likely belong to. And the group has permission to read the files. Thus you can access them, when you zip them up and move it, the ownership is retained (as it should be)

So without being the owner or Admin privileges, you cannot modify the file (again as it should be).

 

[Nutbolt]

I see. But they were originally my files. I created them years ago when I was freelance. The external hard drive is full of my freelance work. Some of which I copied over.

do you think it’s asking for passwords from my previous computer (un-attached to my current job) from when I was freelance?

 

[ferrarr]

Why did you choose to "zip" the files? Couldn't you have just connected the external drive to the MBP? Then you could have opened them, and saved them?

 

[Nutbolt]

I know. I wish I did that now but I was intending to copy them over and work on them and put them back on at a later date.

 

[IWT]

Even if all the files are, as you say, legitimately yours, you are viewing them on a new system which requires Admin privileges if you want to change anything. You don't have Admin privileges as the system is owned by a "company" or "group".

And, no, using your PW from before will not help at all. Sorry.

Ian

 

[Raz0rEdge]

The issue is Unix ownership, which gets a little complicated to explain but when you create a user on a computer, they are assigned a number (their ID) and all files are owned by this user.

If you create the SAME user on another machine, you usually get the same ID if you are the first user on there, but there's no guarantee.

On your current machine, open up the Terminal and type the command "id" and hit enter. You will see a number of things, look at UID and GID. On my machine my UID is 501 and GID is 20. Now if your UID was 505 on the other computer, you are not the same user as far as macOS is concerned.

Thus, you would need to change ownership to your new account on your current machine.

 

[Nutbolt]

Ah. I see and there’s so I’m definitely going to have to get admin to delete it for me?