[all2ofme]

I've got an issue with my external drive (Lacie in the list below):

Mollbook:Volumes ben$ ls -abehklO /Volumes
total 4
drwxrwxrwt@ 8 root admin hidden 272B 11 Jul 20:06 .
0: group:everyone deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit,only_i nherit
drwxrwxr-t 30 root admin - 1.1K 11 Jul 18:53 ..
drwxr-xr-x 1 ben staff - 12K 8 Jul 11:18 BOOTCAMP
drwxrwxr-t 28 root admin - 1.0K 11 Jul 18:21 Backup
drwxr-xr-x 14 ben staff - 544B 1 May 17:20 Lacie
drwxrwxr-x 14 ben staff - 544B 1 May 17:20 Mirror
drwxrwxr-t 29 root admin - 1.0K 5 Jul 11:39 Tempbackup
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin - 1B 11 Jul 18:53 Tiddler -> /

The issue is some odd permissions on my Aperture library (and potentially other areas). Apparently I have custom access:

_unknown - Read & Write
staff - Read only
everyone - Read only

There's nothing on this disk that needs to retain any special permissions as far as I know. It's a data drive, not bootable, no system files etc.

I've already done chmod 755 "Lacie", but that hasn't helped.

Is there something sensible I can do to get the ownership back to where it should be?

Note to mods - I've duped this from (http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/...missions-need/), as it's more clearly defining my problem rather than piggy backing off the original, less specific thread. I've added notes to that thread to say that I've created this one.

[P]

Easiest way is to instruct the OS to ignore permissions on the drive. I see in the other thread that you don't want that, but please remember, anyone else can tick that box on your drive and just go on to make changes.

If you really want to change the permissions, you should change the owner to yourself. You need to be root to do that, and you really shouldn't do that recursively over the entire drive. Either you locate the individual files and directories that need fixing and do

sudo chown username filename

or you hack up some fancy script using find on that "unknown" user and process them one by one. Should be fairly easy to set up a for loop in bash, but I really need to test some things before I recommend a setup, and I'm not at my Mac now.

[all2ofme]

Hi P,

Thanks for the note.

I've found this (Aperture 2: Troubleshooting Basics) for the Aperture permissions repair, but am hesitant to leave it at that because of all the other stuff on the drive (iTunes library, folders of docs etc.).

If you did have a chance to look into something along the lines of what you mentioned yesterday that'd be lovely and I would be forever grapefruit!

Ben

[AKcrab]

I really don't understand what your concern is.

If you're worried about what happens if someone steals your drive, no amount of monkeying with permissions is going to help protect your data.

If that's not your concern... What is?

[all2ofme]

Other users on the machine is my concern. Most of this data would be stored in my home folder if my SSD were 2TB in size

It's my girlfriend (or others) accidentally deleting files, photos etc. Does that make more sense? Completely understand that undesired physical access isn't something permissions will rescue me from.