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I had a time machine backup on an external drive, but since having the computer repaired (new hard drive, updated OS to 10.12 - Sierra) many of the folders on the external drive are now locked with the red "-" icon showing in Finder. Before the update, I was always able to access the files there.

This is a very large volume and attempting to unlock through Finder is prohibitive, so I attempted to unlock using:

sudo chflags -R nouchg <path>
sudo chflags -R noschg <path>

After finding no results, ie, still cannot read the contents, cannot chown or chmod even using sudo, I inspected the flags on this and other folders that are locked using:

ls -lO

However, this shows "-" in the immutable field, ie, the immutable bit is not set.

So how is it that the folders are locked, yet the immutable bit is not set on those folders?

And how to unlock them?

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  • The red "-" doesn't indicate it's locked, it indicates you don't have permission to read/see into the file/folder. What does ls -le show? Also, what does mount show about how the volume is mounted?
    – Gordon Davisson
    Sep 2, 2017 at 17:38
  • Have you tried simply disabling perms on the drive? Get Info, check 'ignore ownership'
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 2, 2017 at 19:52

2 Answers 2

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I checked with Apple, and they told me that Time Machine backups are set up that way by design. Of course this makes perfect sense actually, to not mess with permissions/ownership on a TM backup as it could mess up a restore from TM if one ever tried to do that. While Marco Doll's answer may have been a way around it (disable SIP), I opted not to try it and take Apple's advice. If this was my own machine and I knew I would never be using those files to do a TM restore, I probably would have tried that, but since this was a friend's computer the responsible path was obvious.

The simple solution in this case was simply to plug the drive into another computer. In doing this all files were read accessible and I was able to copy the files the user needed onto another volume, which were now readable on the user's machine.

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You need to disable SIP. Start while holding Command+R. Open terminal, type in

csrutil disable

Type in password, enter, and restart Mac.

Now SIP is disabled. Try now if you can do it. Use the same command to enable.

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