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Linda Jones Author

Level 1

17 points

External G-Drive Pro says read-only under permissions

I have a new G-Drive Pro external hard drive to replace a previous model of the same make. I have it set up to Time Machine on my desktop, but when I try to copy other files to it I am unable to- it says "read only" under permissions with no way to change permissions. Apple support article says Time Machine prevents this- but I was able to do it with my older G-Drive Pro. Does this mean I can't back up my laptop to this external drive?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jul 27, 2023 2:05 PM

Top-ranking reply

Tesserax

Level 10

152,308 points

Posted on Jul 27, 2023 2:41 PM

When you set up this external drive for Time Machine (TM), TM will "assume" that the whole drive is dedicated to it.

A couple of things:

It's generally not a good idea to dual-use a drive for both TM & file storage.
However, if that is your intended goal, then the drive should first be partitioned to, at least, two volumes/containers. For example, if you have an 8 TB drive, create two container each being 4 TB.

The actual container sizes you want to use will depend on your computing requirements. You would then point TM to use one of those two containers ... which one, doesn't really matter.

FYI ... with the later versions of macOS, that use the APFS file system by default, what was used to be called partitions, are now called containers. Both can contain one or more volumes. All of this can be managed using the Apple Disk Utility.

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External G-Drive Pro says read-only under permissions

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