Permissions confusion

[myotis]

I have just upgraded to Snow Leopard (clean install) and backed up all my files on a QNAP NAS.

Now that I have brought them back I noticed that several file types (e.g. .bak, .rhistory, .org etc) are showing as a black icon with "exec" on them.


Other files such as DOC and XLS files looked normal.

However, looking at the permissions "all" the files from the back up have permissions

-rwx---------(700) (including Excel and Word files)

and new files created since the upgrade e.g. an Excel file

have permissions

-rw-r--r--(644)

Can anyone explain what has happened here and how I can get the permissions back to the way I "think" they should be.

Many thanks

 

[Bernard SG]

Assuming you haven't done that yet, try to repair permissions with Disk Utility on your backup drive?

 

[(marc)]

Try to repair permissions with the disk utility. Alternatively, you can use the chmod command from the Terminal app, for example to change permissions on the entire Documents folder, you'd use:

chmod -R 644 ~/Documents

 

[myotis]

Assuming you haven't done that yet, try to repair permissions with Disk Utility on your backup drive?

Thanks, I have run repair permissions on the hard drive on the Macbook pro, but the files weren't really on a back up drive, but a folder on a NAS which is formatted as NTFS, I suspect that the MAC repair permissions wouldn't work on that.

Interestingly however, the repair permissions on the MacBook HD found hundreds and hundreds of permissions to repair. But this was done before I realised all the permissions were wrong, I just did it as part of the final re-install process.

Graham

 

[Bernard SG]

Thanks, I have run repair permissions on the hard drive on the Macbook pro, but the files weren't really on a back up drive, but a folder on a NAS which is formatted as NTFS, I suspect that the MAC repair permissions wouldn't work on that.

Interestingly however, the repair permissions on the MacBook HD found hundreds and hundreds of permissions to repair. But this was done before I realised all the permissions were wrong, I just did it as part of the final re-install process.

Graham

NTFS do you say? Maybe that's the reason? AFAIK Mac OS X cannot write on an NTFS (which btw gets me puzzled on how you managed to backup your mac on the NAS ).
Anyway, sorry, just a +/- advanced user here, not an expert at all.

 

[myotis]

Try to repair permissions with the disk utility. Alternatively, you can use the chmod command from the Terminal app, for example to change permissions on the entire Documents folder, you'd use:

chmod -R 644 ~/Documents

Thanks, I will give that a go.

Graham

 

[myotis]

NTFS do you say? Maybe that's the reason? AFAIK Mac OS X cannot write on an NTFS (which btw gets me puzzled on how you managed to backup your mac on the NAS ).

Well, that puzzled me as well when I got my Mac, but apparently on a server it doesn't matter what format the server HDs are, because its the server software that does the communication.

Anyway, until Snow Leapard there has never been an issue, but now Finder won't work with the NAS either, but PathFinder works perfectly. A different but seemingly common problem since Snow Leopard came out and not yet fixed by Apple.

Graham

 

[myotis]

chmod -R 644 ~/Documents

Marc,

I have done this and the contents have vanished!!

Info for the folder say Folder (41) size 0 bytes

Permissions for the folder are now drw-r--r--(644),

but when I open it with PathFinder its empty, but when I try and open it with Finder, it says I don't have permission to open it.

I am assuming the files are still there, I just can't access them.

So a bit more help will be very useful.

maybe I should mention that this wasn't on my home directory but my Dropbox directory so the command was

sudo chmod -R 644 ~/Dropbox

Thanks,

Graham

 

[myotis]

A bit more detail.


If I "get info" for the top level "Dropbox" folder, under sharing &permissions it has entries for

graham (me), Staff and Everyone.

All of these are set to "Custom".

Changing the first to Read &Write gets me into the top level folder, but I then have hundreds of subfolders so would still like a command line option to bring these folders back.

At least I have confirmed the files are still there

Graham

 

[myotis]

Solved

There is an option in the Info window to apply the changes to the "enclosed" which seems to have given me access to everything in the folder again.

Graham