How to write to NTFS drives on Mac OS X

Carlos J.
Carlos J.
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

Recently I’ve been trying to use a few external drives that I have with the file system NTFS on Mac. This file system was developed by Microsoft and has several technical improvements over the file systems that it superseded, FAT32. On Ubuntu also that file system works out of the box but to my surprise it doesn’t work on Mac! Apple only supports read mode on NTFS drives. so If you have a NTFS drive for your projects, legal backup movies, video games, pictures, backup music, etc… you will be only able to read but you can’t add or change anything at all.

So after some research I found a way to do it and very similar to the way it behaves in Linux, so it works automatically like any other popular file system

The first thing is, you need to install some packages, so run these commands:

brew cask install osxfuse
brew install ntfs-3g

Now if you are using a recent version Mac OS X you’ll need to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP), if you do not have a never version that “El capitan” you do not to do the Recovery mode. For disable it you need to restart your machine holding down the keys Command + R during the boot (when you see the progress bar) to enter into Recovery mode.

Now in the Utilities bar menu select the option “open a terminal and type there:

csrutil disable

Reboot again and once you open your favourite terminal, you will have to change the default mount_ntfs. If you run these commands you will also create a backup of the original so you can always rollback in case that you do not want to use this method any longer:

sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.bk
sudo ln -s /usr/local/sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs

Reboot one last time in recovery mode to enable back the System Integrity Protection (SIP) typing in the bash terminal from Utilities:

csrutil enable

And that’s all. Now every time you plug in a NTFS disk it will be writable by default.

Carlos J.

Written by

Carlos J.

Steampunk coder ✞ Do fairies have a tail?

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