NTFS for Mac not closing

I was installing NTFS for Mac and then I started getting told to give it full disk access.

It's pretty bizarre Paragon would tell you that. The installed driver already gives you read/write access to an NTFS formatted drive. You shouldn't need to do anything else.

Well, not unless changes to macOS over the years causes the OS to treat a normally unsupported format with suspicion, and you have to tell the OS it's okay to access it. Which is still weird since even without the drivers, you can still read an NTFS volume. Or, you're supposed to be able to.

Before I installed NTFS for Mac, I was able to read-write to an external drive. Now it won't show up as a location on a finder window.

I haven't payed a lot of attention to NTFS lately (like the past few years), but I have seen a few other recent topics here where users are having trouble accessing an NTFS drive in Sonoma and Sequoia.

It is now read-only. And it looks like everything I had on it is gone.

That's certainly not good. I can't test it either since the last drive I owned with NTFS was reformatted to ExFAT.

The data is likely still there, but macOS isn't reading the NTFS format properly. If you remove the Paragon drivers and restart, can you then see the files on the NTFS drive?

If so, I would strongly recommend to stop using NTFS. If you have it formatted that way because it's a drive you move between Windows and Mac computers, copy everything off to either computer, reformat the drive as ExFAT and then copy everything back.

Both systems can read/write ExFAT without the need for any special drivers.

Yes, you can remove NTFS from Paragon. It has no purpose without an NTFS formatted drive to create write access for.

FYI, you should never have two NTFS drivers installed at the same time since which one will be in control? Uninstall the first driver & reboot before attempting to install the other NTFS driver.

Also, I recently looked at the free & open source NTFS drivers for someone and it seems that those drivers may no longer be actively maintained which means they could have issues on the more recent versions of macOS. In fact, a couple of people forked the drivers....even the one which appears to be more "popular" and actively maintained seems it may still have data loss issues. I wasn't impressed by what I saw at this time, perhaps with time things will get better, but I would be very careful with those 3rd party FUSE drivers at the moment such as NTFS for Mac.

Paragon seems to be the main paid NTFS driver that appears to work well....at least until a macOS update or upgrade occurs, then it may take them a bit of time to update their driver.

Unfortunately Apple re-wrote their FAT and exFAT driver in Sonoma moving it from a Kernel Extension into a user space driver. It appears to have some growing pains as we have seen numerous reports of people having issues with Sonoma & Sequoia (more than in previous years anyway).....while others seem to have no problems.

If you're trying to give yourself read/write access to an NTFS formatted drive, that's not what Full Disk Access is for.