Yosemite upgrade messed up file permissions

Should I re-install Yosemite to fix all of these issues, or what? How?

Thanks.

I would. You can also try Repairing Disk Permissions in Disk Utility. That will only affect things outside your Home folder, though.

There is a home folder reset routine if you boot into Recovery.

Once booted, Open Terminal from the Utilities menu.

Type resetpassword and hit return.

Select your hard disk, then the user.

Click the Reset Home Folder Permissions and ACLs button.

Quit the utility and restart.

how do I boot into recovery?

Restart. When you hear the Startup Tone, hold down Cmd-R.

Try creating a new user account and allow it to administer the Mac.

Then, log into that account and see if you can set everything up without problems?

If you can, then it is isolated to your account and not system-wide.

I would assume the crashing is linked to all the other problems.

If the problems are system-wide, I would erase the drive and reinstall on a clean drive, then migrate your data from your backup.

If you have a backup from prior to installing Yosemite, that would be best. But, as it appears to be a system problem, I wouldn’t worry about that.

Once you know you have a good backup,

Boot into Recovery. OS X: About OS X Recovery

Open Disk Utility

Select the Macintosh HD volume and Erase it using the Erase tab.

Quit Disk Utility.

Select Reinstall OS X.

Once installed, go through the Startup Assistant and create a new account that isn’t the same name as your old account. Neither part, Full name or short name.

You can use that account to test now and in the future. Once it seems to be working fine, you can use Migration Assistant (/Applications/Utilities folder) to migrate the user off of the backup and onto your new installation. If you use Time Machine or a Clone, it will bring an exact copy of your user account over to the new installation.

Same problem.

I've only just upgraded but so far every file/folder I have on my desktop requires authentication before performing an action despite the sharing and permissions settings looking okay.

I have just started experiencing this same problem.

I tried to reboot in recovery mode, but the disk utilities that opens does not have Terminal available. I am not sure what to do. I am unable to use my Mac and cannot find my mail. I also cannot open Time Machine to recover older apps, etc.

HELP!!!!!

Is your account admin or non-admin? Parental controls on? I've been having very similar issues with non-admin accounts. If I make it an admin account everything works correctly. Change it back and all the problems start again.

I've got similar problems. It started with installing Yosemite (non-dev release) on my MBP 17" (late 2011 = 8,3). The actual installation went quick and without complaints, but then the problems began.

None of my mainly used apps worked correctly: Mail, Safari, Firefox, VMware Fusion, 1Password, iCloud etc. pp. I also couldn't edit my own documents. Inspecting permissions in Finder showed that ACLs were kind of weird, showing my account twice. In Terminal, files had permissions rw–-–-rw- (read-write for me and for everyone, no permissions for group). As stated here, repairing permissions does not help anything inside users' home directories.

I was able to drill it down to my Login keychain which was reported to be read-only (?!?) — and empty. I understand that this was a main cause of problems like not being able to start iCloud services and entailing a slew of further effects. It got better when I set my home dir's permissions correctly and applied them recursively to all my files (all using Finder). I also restored the login.keychain from Time Machine. This helped a bit, since then I was at least able to use the system without constantly being nagged by error messages.

I also changed my account to have admin rights as advised here.

Restoring Firefox and Safari worked also by restoring files in ~/Library/… using Time Machine.

Repairing Mail was more complicated, after trying to let Mail upgrade itself from the files already in my Library (getting stuck every time) I restored the Library/Mail folder from TM, disabled all Mail accounts via System Preferences and one by one re-activated them. Now it seems as everything is working again.

Repairing VMware Fusion was the hardest part so far. Since my main VM has 250 GB, it is not included in TM. It turned out that one snapshot's configuration file (*.vmdk) had zero length. I copied a different snapshot's vmdk and modified it accordingly. After some fiddling I got the VM to work again — phew!

So, basically I can work again, after repairing the system from Friday till Monday (Thanks Apple for this wasted weekend!). But every now and then, errors keep popping up. For example, today Safari again lost its stored tabs. Understandably, my confidence in my work machine dwindled away.

Especially looking into Console logs shows that there is still a bunch of things in disorder:

UserEventAgent[19]: Failed to remove /.MobileBackups.trash, error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=513 "“.MobileBackups.trash” couldn’t be removed because you don’t have permission to access it."

kernel[0]: BUG in process suhelperd[238]: over-released legacy external boost assertions (0 total, 0 external, 0 legacy-external)

kernel[0]: Sandbox: mdworker(8258) deny file-read-data /Users/xy/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.revocation.plist

pboard[8420]: Attempt to unlink previous shared memory during startup returned an error. Continuing...

ocspd[136]: Error opening OCSP cache (100022)

kernel[0]: Sandbox: appleeventsd(28) deny file-read-metadata /Library

mdworker[8683]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.photostream-agent[8835]) LaunchServices returned a bundle URL that does not match with the LoginItem's known association.

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.photostream-agent) Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

I only picked some messages I consider relevant; some of them are logged by the hundreds, filling up the log files. I also suspect there are problems with sandboxing.

Any hints what to do? Re-install? Hope for 10.10.1? Consult a Genius?

Problems are still occurring now. I had decided to give a re-install a try, therefore I was backing up my current Yosemite system in advance via Time Machine. But suddenly the system stopped working, one window after the other showed the spinning beach ball and was non-responsive. My shell session showed errors like /bin/ls: device not configured (IIRC). And I saw in iStatMenus that all disk activity had ceased first, then my hard disk drive had just vanished — which is part of the Fusion drive that carries my root filesystem. Not good.

I wonder if this is a real hardware error, since it is quite a big coincidence that this happens shortly after installing Yosemite. Besides, S.M.A.R.T. status for the device reads "Verified" in diskutil info, and SMARTReporter says so, too. Understandably, there is no record of the problems in any log file.

At the moment I'm again trying to have my current, makeshift-wise repaired Yosemite system backed up with Time Machine (or I will buy a new external HD and make a CCC backup), then re-install Yosemite. One try, and if there are still problems, I'll restore my trusty old Mavericks system again. 😐

Bit by bit, I'm sick of this update. Never had such a poor OS X experience, being a happy Mac user since 2004. 😠

Here's an update from me:

I now have installed Yosemite for the second time, using my repaired Yosemite 1st trial as the basis.

Piece of advise: If you have really huge installations residing under /usr/local (in my case it's TeXlive with > 100,000 files, > 3 GB): move it away or deinstall it before installing Yosemite. Otherwise the "last minute" of the installation might last for half an hour…

Installation finally finished without complaints. After starting the system, so far everything seems fine.

Quickly checked applications: Mail, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Aperture incl. iCloud PhotoStreams, iTunes incl. iTunes Match, Contacts, Calendar, iCloud Preferences, Keychain Access, 1Password, CrashPlan — all fine, especially everything having to do with logins, passwords, etc.

Printing had the same problem as before, which is comprehensible as the 3rd party software cannot handle the strict sandbox setting. However, Epson told me they are about to release a new driver soon. For now I will use the workaround.

I hope that's it now.

So, conclusion: That was a close shave, Apple! 😉

And, always remember making backups, just in case something goes wrong…

I'm happy I'm not alone on this. It took me a while to figure out the ACLs were the root of a lot of (often unpredictable) grief.

I've attempted booting to recovery holding "cmd-r" and running

$ resetpassword

in terminal but when the gui window pops up the "reset" button at the bottom along with everything else is greyed out. Nothing shows up in the top window either (no disks to select).

I'm at a loss here. I even paid the $30 for an apple support conversation, which culminated with the $ resetpassword suggestion. After that didn't work I tried to open the link to "reopen support case" in the 'do-not-reply@apple.com' follow up email to ask for a solution but they sent a dead link..

But fear not, Android is maturing as an operating system.

Same issue here. Experiencing the same thing when trying resetpassword in Terminal. Has anyone had any luck with anything else?

"I've attempted booting to recovery holding "cmd-r" and running

$ resetpassword

in terminal but when the gui window pops up the "reset" button at the bottom along with everything else is greyed out. Nothing shows up in the top window either (no disks to select)."

My main admin login worked fine, but all other 5 users had the same issues: repeated iCloud login requests, couldn't sync dropbox, couldn't access any OS X System prefs applications.

The following worked for me:

Use Cmd-R/ resetpassword/ and reset ACLs for every user (as noted above)

Log into each account via Safe Mode (hold shift after system bootup tone)

Login into each user and Set permissions for everyone to read/write (only way to add additional users to set permissions in next step)

reboot: login to each user account and Set permissions for (Username) folder (and all subfolders) to read/write for admin & user and read-only for everyone

Login into my account (admin): set permissions for ~Library folder (and all subfolders) to read/write for admin and my login

reboot: login as admin, repair disk permissions

I was then able to log into each user's account separately and verify that all "seemed" back to normal (at least at first glance)