File Permissions

Hey again!

Thanks for the info.....since two different external drives, and each assigned to a particular Mac, this would be expected, as you are in a different admin account than where the backups were initiated from.

I know the permissions within a Time Machine backup cannot be altered on the external drive itself.

Its possible, considering the drives aren’t fully encrypted and you have the password, to move the folders or files onto your other Mac, them grant read and write permissions to your current admin account, allowing you to view the files in it.

I’ve also seen, on another Mac, creating an admin account on another Mac, with the same username / home folder name, and even password as the one on which the backups were done......once that’s set up, do a fresh backup on this Mac, and you may have full permissions then, but again it also depends on your Mac security settings and your user settings.

Can I ask if you are “Entering Time Machine” via the menu, or if you are opening the “Backups.backup” folder via a Finder to view the data?

If you have to:

Drag the folders with the red "-" somewhere onto your Mac, (Preferably not in iCloud, if iCloud Desktop and Documents is on, you can choose another location like Downloads, or the Home folder).

Next:

Right click the folder > Get Info.

Click the lock on the bottom right to unlock it using your current admin credentials.

If nothing is showing under, "Sharing and Permissions", click the disclosure triangle to the left of it.

Click the "+" on the bottom left, choose your current user account, (It should be the one that's selectable).

Click Done.

Next, on the bottom again, next to the current user you just added, to the right, click on "Read Only" and change it to "Read and Write".

Next, click the gear icon, or the icon with three dots on the bottom and select, "Apply to enclosed items", then "Okay" or "Done".

You should soon have access to the data in those folders, and can move them, or whatever you need to do with them.

That said, again a more permanent, possible workaround would be to keep the drive connected.

Create a new admin user with the same username/home folder name and password, (If possible, and that's assuming the current user has a different username).

Next, log into the newly created user account and do a fresh Time Machine backup.

Once done, restart and check to see if you the have the permissions you were looking for.

As far as I know, if you select the option to inherit the backups, when doing your first backup on a new Mac, should have access to the data, I believe there is another option on the permissions of the external drive you're using to, "Ignore Ownership", with an option to ignore or not. So I believe those two things are a factor in having access or not to the data on the drive, as well as the drives being encrypted or not, etc.

Anyhow, hope this helps! Normally, after a typical migration this problem doesn't occur, but will, considering the circumstances. I also believe the name of the Mac in System Settings > General > Sharing has a role to play in the backups and permissions.

One way to see the actual permissions, would be to access the drive using Terminal. Then CD to the folder or directory you want to view and type ls -al. To the left you will see what the permissions are for

user, group, other (world). To see your drive names. Type cd /Volumes. Then CD to the Volume name of choice. If there are spaces in the name then you would use single quote marks. EG- cd /Volumes

cd 'my external usb drive', ls -al.

Custom access means there is an Access Control List (ACL) set on that directory of the drive. I can imagine they might have an ACL set there, but I don't have a backup drive connected to check what I have on my backup drives.

I don’t know if you’ll still run into the same permission issues, but if you hold down the option key while selecting the time machine menu, you’ll have the option to browse other backup discs. You could then browse the one made for the other Mac in the time machine, interface, but again, I don’t know if that will give you a permission error.

Hey inspectorwood!

I understand the permissions show as custom. However, are you having any types of issues accessing your Time Machine backup files? I think if that's the case, it may help to know more, cheers.

Hey Inspectorwood!

Good to hear, and good to know! I try not to mess around much with the advanced settings, as I’ve seen it cause major permissions issues. I wonder if the permissions retain after upgrading both Macs.......I’m guessing you don’t want to find out 😂 and I don’t blame you.

Makes sense to me! Hope all goes well!