Creating new Folder to External Hard Drive

I've searched the forums and found many discussions on this, but I am in a quandary. I have a 4 TB Seagate external hard drive with approximately 2 TB of data backed up to it. I have been obviously saving data to that external drive with no problems.

Today, I attempted to move some data from my MacBookPro to the external drive and was unable to create a folder. Reading the forums, I checked my permissions and it now shows I have "Read Only" permissions. Additionally, it shows the drive formatted in NTFS.

How is this possible?? Everything was fine 8 weeks ago. How can I fix this?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jul 10, 2016 8:19 AM

17 replies

Jul 10, 2016 10:56 AM in response to Drew Reece

I agree that NTFS can be trouble, and should be avoided if possible.

Readers who must interchange with Windows are advised to initialize their drives as Ex-FAT, which Mac OS can read and write.

If you do not regularly move this drive and Read and Write it on a Windows system, the default Mac OS format (GUID partition map and MacOS Extended, journaled ) is the most reliable by far.

Phil0124

Level 10

216,932 points

Jul 11, 2016 8:02 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Yes, if you are not using this drive with a Windows machine, it would be best to have it formatted as Mac Extended and avoid such issues in the future.

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Creating new Folder to External Hard Drive