iMovie Export Issue "File already open with with write permission"

Are you using Time Machine backup on your computer? There's been some issues recently across the Discussion Group relating to a feature that keeps a copy of the backup on the Internal Hard drive of the Mac. But it usually affects computers with Time Machine turned on and usually on computers with OS X 10.7 (Lion).

This requires using the Terminal app, in your Applications/Utilities folder

To turn off Time Machine snapshots type in the following command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

The Mac will likely ask for your password, so type it in and hit the return key. The type the word, exit and hit return. Quit Terminal.

Open iMovie and try doing another export and see if the same error message pops up.

Lucky for everyone this posted pretty quickly as a lot of people had the same problem at the same time around the end of October. So I've been cutting and pasting this response in to anyone who had the File Permissions error as soon as I would see it appear on the Discussion Group. Good Luck!

How do you turn Time Machine snapshots back on? Does this error only occur when iMovie is exporting/sharing and Time Machine starts up? Could the same effect be accomplished by ejecting the external drive that Time Machine uses while exporting with iMovie?

his requires using the Terminal app, in your Applications/Utilities folder

To turn off Time Machine snapshots type in the following command:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

The Mac will likely ask for your password, so type it in and hit the return key. The type the word, exit and hit return. Quit Terminal.

It's a toggle switch you can enable and disable at any time as needed.

It's not so much when Time Machine is running, it's constantly doing it in the background when it sees a file 'changing' and when you are using iMovie files are changing constantly being written into the Local Backup. But you only see the end result of this 'conflict' when you issue any command from the Share Menu (export/sharing).

The same effect could be accomplished by temprorarily turning off Time Machine as has been mentioned by other contributors on the iMovie Discussion Group. If you Eject the external drive, you might have to open Disk Utility to remount the drive. So I think turning off Time Machine might be more straight forward. But if you want the extra insurance of not having any 'external' devices grabbing the attention of iMovie or interrupting it while exporting, by all means please do eject the drive. That will take one more variable out of the Export Failure Equation.

I can't enter my password when I get there the keyboard doesn't type. the sudo et went in fine.

Leslie Davidson, when you type your password in Terminal at the password prompt, it will NOT show you the characters as you type. That is a security feature built into the underlying Mac OS, so type it in as accurately as possible, then hit the Enter key. If it needs the password again, you might have to type it in one more time to confirm it, then hit Enter. So don't worry, it's not failing, it's just the way that it works (it's a Unix based operating system)

elikness...

You totally saved my life... Thanks so much! I don't know technically what happened but after days...nad 40 hours total, I finally got a version of a 2 hour movie rendered and I'm not done...LOTS of lessons learned but thanks again, I'm not sure if you'll ever read this but....

here's to you...

No problem, and I must also give full credit wherever I can to Karsten Schluter, a longtime Discussion Group Contributor. He was as far as I know the first person to post this fix on the group. After that I just attempted to identify and copy and paste this response into the postings where I thought it most closely applied. I'm glad you got your project working and that you were productive with the software, as that's the most important thing. Good Luck!

Thanks for this as i just did a search and found this and it fixed my problem.

Quick question, since i use time machine pretty regularly (every evening) is there anything i need to "turn back on" or is everything still going to work correctly?

So my question is are you turning off time machine or just disabling the local 'snapshot' using the command line and the Terminal.app on your Macintosh. If you turn off time machine, you MUST turn it back on for everything to still work correctly. As for the local 'snapshot' if you leave that disabled, regular time machine backups still occur at the regular intervals they always do, and everything will still work correctly.

This is great, I was having this same issue. Glad someone has it figured out.

So in disableing this 'snapshot' what does that do exactly? I really would like to make sure time machine continues to back up.

What is the difference in time machine backups and the snapshot feature? And if I restart will that take all the settings back to factory? Or do I have to do this command again or another command?

Thanks