What does "Apply to enclosed items" really do???

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Level 1

8 points

What does "Apply to enclosed items" really do???

I recently was setting permissions for access to my MacBook Pro HD by another Mac on my LAN. I selected "Apply to enclosed items" (seemed obvious) and set it in motion; after all, I wanted all items on the HD to be accessible. I don't remember the exact chain of events after that, but my external HD attached started getting erased (I stopped it, but too late) and the laptop didn't work at all normal. I opted for a restart, but it never came back. It turned out, both hard drives were destroyed; technicians could not repair. So, $300 later, with a new internal and external drive purchased and installed, and two days rebuilding the the contents of them both, I'm finally back in action. But I'll NEVER hit the "Apply . . ." button again.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Feb 24, 2015 7:38 AM

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Answer 1

BobHarris

Level 9

56,783 points

Feb 24, 2015 7:58 AM in response to roweswork

It should NOT have damaged the physical disk.

What it does is take the permissions you set for the single folder, and apply those permissions and ownership to every file and folder under that folder.

Depending on what the starting folder was, this may make a Mac no longer bootable, as many system level folders require specific permissions to operate.

But that should not damage the physical disk. At minimum it would mean running repair permissions from the recovery partition or if before Lion, from the installation DVD.

At worse, it would require reinstalling the operating system, and recovering your data from a backup (everyone should have regular backups (plural)).

The only way a disk would be damaged is if this disk was already failing and the intense activity going through all the files writing new permissions just pushed the disk over the edge.

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