Enable NTFS write support in MacOS High Sierra (10.13.x)

Prerequisite

Before you begin, make sure Homebrew is installed on your current system. You can install Homebrew pasting following command in your Terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Steps

1. We need to disable the system integrity protection first. Reboot the Mac and hold Command+R at boot to get into the recovery console. Open up the Terminal from the “Utilities” menu and type in the following:

csrutil disable

Now reboot your Mac again and and let it boot normally. Open the Terminal to check if the system integrity status is disabled using this command:

csrutil status

If that outputs something like:

System Integrity Protection status: disabled.

in your Terminal then we are good to go for the next steps:

2. Install osxfuse using homebrew with following command in your Terminal:

brew cask install osxfuse

then install ntfs-3g:

brew install ntfs-3g

3. Watch Terminal carefully. If you don’t see any error / warnings you can just proceed to Step-4 skipping the rest of this step. But ntfs-3g installation may provide following error in your terminal:

Error: Could not symlink sbin/ntfs-3g
usr/local/sbin is not writable.

No worries, you are in the right track! To fix that let’s create the required directory with this command in the Terminal:

sudo mkdir sbin

enable write permission in sbin directory using:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix) 

then link ntfs-3g with this command:

brew link ntfs-3g

4. Now the most important part — we need to replace the exisitng NTFS driver as follows:

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

5. Last but not least, you need to re-enable the system integrity protection again! Reboot your Mac into the recovery console by holding Command+R while rebooting. In the recovery console, open the terminal window and re-enable the system integrity using following command:

csrutil enable

Then reboot your Mac normally again. Connect your external NTFS drive and volla — you can now write on the disk! Do some house-cleaning on your mac, back it up in your external NTFS drive, or do whatever you wish :)

Stay lazy and productive!

DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!

If you failed to follow the steps properly you may end up bricking your Mac and I am afraid I can’t be there to support you.