Hello, I have an external hard drive. It states that I have permission to read and write when I click it in the finder and select Get Info. I keep getting the message “Copy Failed: You don’t have permission” whenever I try to copy stuff to it. I am also aware that I am authorized to read and write the file that I am attempting to duplicate. Several files have been tried, but none have worked. The external hard drive still has about 300 gigabytes. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
According to your description, the issue shouldn’t be related to the file system, file permission, or external disk space. Then, I suggest that you try a different way to copy the files from Mac to the external drive. If you still can’t copy files from Mac to the external hard drive, run First Aid to check and repair the external hard drive, and try to copy the files again.
The last resort you can apply is to reformat the disk to make it usable again, but this will erase all drive data, hence, you’d better save data off the drive before you reformat it. You can free download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to quickly recover your data from the problematic drive.
If you’re unable to write to an external hard drive on your Mac despite having the proper permissions, the external hard drive could be locked or in use by another process, you can eject and reconnect the drive, ensuring it’s not being used by any other applications (like Time Machine or other software). You can also try restarting your Mac to reset any locked processes.