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Can't write to external hard drive after latest Big Sur update

After the latest Big Sur update, I can no longer write to my Seagate external hard drive (formatted in NTFS), I have been using NTFS for Mac software to manage the drive. The problem persists even though the drive is connected directly to your 2019 iMac. I want to regain the written permission on the Seagate drive. The solution I tried was to buy a second HD and transfer data on a Seagate drive to it, after a while, data could not be seen, Disk Utility was no use, and I got a sign that the drive was corrupted, now I wonder what's the best external hard drive for Mac. Heartbroken..., any tips would be appreciated.

Best Answered by

Yuri Zhang

Answered on Tuesday, December 3, 2024

To restore write permissions on your Seagate NTFS drive after the Big Sur update, adopt the following steps:

1. Update NTFS for Mac Software and ensure that you are using the latest version of the NTFS for Mac software.

2. Go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy and make sure that the NTFS for Mac software has the necessary permissions under the Privacy tab.

3. If the current NTFS software continues to err. Uninstall the current NTFS for Mac software and use an alternative NTFS driver like iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, which is often updated to keep up with macOS changes. 

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4. Try manually mounting the drive with write permissions using Terminal. Use the command as follows and replace /dev/disk2s1 with the actual identifier for your drive, which can be found using diskutil list:sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,auto,nobrowse /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/MySeagateDrive

After these steps, the problem should be solved. By the way, as the questioner asked, when selecting an external hard drive, consider these options for your information: Western Digital My Passport for Mac, Seagate Backup Plus for Mac, LaCie Rugged Mini, Samsung T5/T7 Portable SSD, and others.