Files on Exfat Drive Locked

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Level 1

8 points

Files on Exfat Drive Locked

I have a USB drive formatted Exfat. The drive itself shows Read & Write permissions. However every single individual file shows as locked, with permissions showing as "you can only read".

Within the Get Info dialogue, I am able to click "unlock" on individual files, returning permission to Read & Write.

There are tens of thousands of files contained within hundreds of folders, and so manually unlocking the files will take days.

Does anyone know if there's a way to batch-unlock files?

I suspect the origin of the problem resides with Paragon APFS, which I had used to transfer from an APFS formatted drive to an ExFat drive on a Windows machine.

macOS Sonoma 14.5

Macbook Pro M1

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 14.5

Posted on Oct 31, 2024 3:24 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

19,706 points

Oct 31, 2024 5:08 AM in response to EuanPreston

recursively in folders is what I'm hoping for, since there are hundreds of nested folders within the project. I'm comfortable using Terminal

Try this after you cd to the parent folder (make a backup of that folder first, just in case):

chflags -R nouchg .

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Answer 2

Oct 31, 2024 4:03 AM in response to EuanPreston

EuanPreston wrote:

Does anyone know if there's a way to batch-unlock files?

You can batch unlock by selecting all in a folder and Option-Get Info [Show Inspector] and unlock them all.

I'll let you know if I find a way to do that recursively to files in folders. That might need a detour to the Terminal.

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Answer 3

EuanPreston Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 31, 2024 4:08 AM in response to Matti Haveri

Thank you - yes - recursively in folders is what I'm hoping for, since there are hundreds of nested folders within the project. I'm comfortable using Terminal.

Thanks again.

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Answer 4

EuanPreston Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 31, 2024 5:45 AM in response to Matti Haveri

This did the trick! Thank you so much!

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