Yosemite upgrade messed up file permissions

SAME Problem here. Small business, wrong time to crash with clients due in 30 mins😟

After a month of Yosemite success, little by little our sample banks and clients working files have suddenly sported little lock's on them causing crashes, errors and now we can't run anything. Blergh. Not the first time Apple have lost us our rent-money.

I have tried repairing file permissions, but that's never worked in the history of Apple.

I don't know what an ACL is (Can anyone clear that up?).

(We are definitely looking at switching to windows PC's for late 2015)

If your disk is encrypted you need to unlock it from disk utility first in order for it to show up in that window. That may be your problem.

seemed easier to migrate user library folder part after part and only most needed prefs, this is disaster apple, the first time i had to recreate home folder EVER. i don't want to give everyone read/write permissions even temporary, it killed almost whole two months of my time and i am still not completely migrated. even worse is that i still not understand what exactly causes it, i want to have a possibility to use one home folder on different x86-based systems to experiment only by setting up the correct uuid:guid.

Thanks! This worked for me. I'm curious about what I should set my to now that I have this issue fixed.

Unlocking was the key step to show hard disk (startup volume) in reset password tool. Thank you, Mike.

Same problem after upgrading to Yosemite 10.3.3 It´s a mess ! I'm not able to open any of my applications. (Chrome, Firefox, Office 2011, etc...)
The only turn around I found is creating a new user where everything work...I do not understand why.

The good point is that I folow Apple suggestion and make a full time machine backup before...

What a loose of time ! I have a lot of work to do and everything is on my main account !

I would like to see Apple get involve a little bit more as I just see that this is not a new problem and I don't any real solutions !

I already tried everything mentioned is this post without success...

Any suggestion ?

I feel very fortunate! All my applications pretty much work (with some minor issues). My only real problem is that I cannot upgrade any applications! Whenever I do (e.g., Adobe Flash, FileMaker Pro, etc.), I get the "spinning ball of death" ("[install application] inactive"), and have to force quit. I thought it was the installer, so I uninstalled Flash - and now I have none! I'm not a "techie", and I have a business to run. Don't have time for this. This is NOT what I expected from Apple (been a faithful user for 27 years). Please, offer a patch ASAP & FIX THIS. Thank you.

This fixed it for me!

Root user and permissions

I recently upgraded. Your post gave me an Idea. I didn't have to go into terminal because it seems only a few files were effected. cmnd-i, then set the permission to all admin and now I have my files back. For some reason it couldn't find my username anymore. But this seems to have solved the problem for me. Looks like others are having more extensive issues.

This post is a bit old, not sure what's the status with you, but I had a very similar problem: Cannot modify files after copying them from old backup to fresh Yosemite installation

and found the solution that worked for me! http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31741/permissions-reset

try it

I spent hours dealing with Google Chrome not working because it could not get into the "google" folder and this fixed it. THANK YOU!!!

I ran into this situation lately . Everything else seemed not to work , even with root permissions. A simple solution worked for me. I noticed that my user account directory (/Users/xxx) was actually locked. You can see this if you open the folder information in finder

• ( ie finder > right click> getInfo.
• the checkbox "Locked" is selected.

Resolution :

- unselect the "locked" checkbox.

... hope this works for you and saves you time. ....a little disappointed with Apple about this

Yay! Finally found the fix. I just replaced my home folder name in both places in the command and voila!

The issue I was having was not being able to open .docx files with word 2016. The error message was that I did not have permissions to open that file, it happened with all my .docx files. If you do not see your disk try turning encryption off in my case it took just over an hour. I had the same issue, after turning encryption off and booting into recovery via "cmd-r", open terminal, type password, and the HD was visible in the window, once I selected the HD my account was also available for selection. Another rookie mistake I made during my adventure is that I went trough this process many times without success, at one point I waited 10 hours and the done button was grayed out. I booted my Macbook pro into OS X and selected my HD, I did not have read&write permissions. Once I gave my account full permissions I was able to repair the home folder permissions with a 15 minute wait time until completion.