Why won't TextEdit save my document to my external hard drive?

The first time you save the file to the external drive using TextEdit does it actually save the file? You've verified this in the Finder and by opening it again?

Maybe try to give TextEdit "Full Disk Access". In the System Preferences go to the "Security & Privacy" pane and then select the "Privacy" tab. Add TextEdit to the "Full Disk Access" section.

What is the format of the drive? Select it and Get Info. Should show format in top bit of info.

What are the permissions on the folder you are trying to save to?

Select it in Finder and Get Info. Permissions are listed at the bottom of the window.

Well, it shouldn't be a permissions problem as ExFAT does not support any sort of permissions.

The only thing I can think of is something in TextEdit is holding the file open or something like that.

Is your document really named "Untitled 20" or is that the name it shows in the dialog. I'm not sure where to go with that, either, but if it is not the name of the document you saved, there's another clue maybe someone else can piece together.

I have the same issue. Have to edit and duplicate each time for the document, affects all my external drives which just so happens to be exFATs. I have a dedicated usb stick just for my timemachine, on that drive the permission error does come up.

my guess is the privacy setting where we have to say enable disable access to external drives, textedit doesn't show up as an app in there, would do a bug report, but there is no category on apple's feedback page for textedit haha.

either minimal people using it, or no one at apple is aware of the issue, since we have had several month of os updates, not sure it is on their radar at the moment. And the community forum probably cannot help here as it seems to be a bug that i cannot report.

Happens to me, too, with Xcode.

I have one partition of my MacBook Pro 2018 formatted with exFat so that I can also use it from the Bootcamp Windows. With macOS 10.14/Mohave, everything worked fine. But since I updated to Catalina a few weeks ago, I can only work normally for some time. After a pause (computer went to sleep), Xcode cannot save any modified files anymore on the exFat disk. It can save a new file under a new name, but then again that file cannot be saved after I modified it. Then, also TextEdit cannot save any files on that disk (except for duplicating, or saving under a new name).

I've tried everything I could find to fix this, nothing helped. Restarting Xcode, killing Xcode, running "chflags -R nouchg *" on the disk, checking if any files are locked, removing the ._* files.

After a reboot of macOS, it works again. But only until the next sleep.

It's not an issue with the filesystem directly, because in Terminal, I can edit + save the files without a problem, e.g. with the editor pico.

macOS 10.15.4

FWIW, you can report a TextEdit bug @ Feedback - macOS - Apple

Seeing it's a part of macOS.

I have just tried to add textedit, and it has the same error. The document "<documentname>.txt" could not be saved.

Ah i can see under Files and Folders, now TextEdit says Full Disk Access. Was wondering how I can add TextEdit as the buttons are greyed out for me.

But no, the same error still occurs.

cool i will try that, but seeing messages is also part of macOS, and it gets it's own category.

Some do, some don't.