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Stopping The Applying of Privileges To Items In Folder?

Huntn

Huntn

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
May 5, 2008
24,618
27,720
The Misty Mountains
I purchased a 1 TB portable WD Essentials drive that I plan on using for backup. I tried to copy my old Time Machine backup folder over to the new drive but was getting messages about ownership. I had a bright idea to apply ownership (Me) to all the items held in the folder about 135 GB worth thinking this would happen in a reasonable amount of time. 2 hours later it's still chugging along.

At this point I'm thinking why not just start a new Time Machine folder? However I don't see a way to stop this System Process of applying ownership to a large number of files. The info box is open, and the message is "applying privileges to Mac 1" (my ext drive). I really don't want to do anything drastic like pulling the plug on the drive. But is there an easy way to safely stop this process? Thanks!
 
6 hours chugging along... Should I pull the plug? :p

Update: Plug pulled. No adverse effects noticed...
 
Last edited:
I would pull the plug.;)
You could alway format it to make sure it's good to go. Then start a fresh backup.:D
 
RE: stopping the change owner process...

Hi Huntn,

While you can, of course, "pull the plug" to stop a process on an external disk drive, this is not normally recommended as it can leave the drive's filesystem in a "bad state". I'm glad you didn't have any problems, but in the future I'd recommend that you stop the process by other means, such as the terminal "kill" commands. By the way, if you have many files on the drive (in the millions, say), then changing the ownership on all of the files can take a long time, especially if your connection to the drive is slow, such as USB2 or wireless or 10/100 Mbps ethernet.

If you want to go back and finish the job of changing ownerships, then you might also consider the "chown" commands, as in "chown -R username:group directoryname".

Lastly, you might also want to check "ps auxww" to make sure that the process was still running and had not just hung before you kill it or pull the plug.

Regards,
Switon
 
There are methods of transferring old TM backups to a new machine/user. Recursively changing the ownership is not one of them!
If you've got a lot of files, then it's going to take some time, but 2 hours+ is perhaps excessive.

Changing the ownership across all the files in the backup is likely to have knackered TM's ability to manage your backup files, so yes, you'll have to start again.

In future, if you want to do anything with a TM backup, look at the man page for tmutil
 
RE: TM ownership...

Hi benwiggy,

Perhaps I misread, and I probably did, but it wasn't clear to me that the OP was changing the ownership of his sparsebundle or TM backup or the 135 GB of files before he made the TM backup of them?

Switon
 
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