Permissions errors after weird Time Machine restored backup
I made a time machine backup of everything that was in /Mac/Users/MYUSER/ and nothing else.
I then erased my drive and reinstalled MacOS.
When I tried to restore from my Time Machine Backup, it made a directory /Mac/2020-09-05-185317/ and did not place the files in the correct places, but instead put the file hierarchy inside /Mac/2020-09-05-185317/ so all my files were in /Mac/2020-09-05-185317/Mac/Users/MYUSER/. There are not a lot of files, so I decided to start moving them from that directory to their proper places manually myself.
Now when my ~/Music dir finished moving, I tried to open iTunes and I get "The folder “iTunes” is on a locked disk or you do not have write permissions for this folder.".
I've checked the permissions in the finder and the iTunes permissions says "MYUSER | Read & Write, staff | Read only, everyone | Read only". I then tried to rename the /Mac/Users/MYUSER/Music/iTunes directory and when doing so, it asks for my root/user password, which I thought was weird/unusual. After renaming the dir, I then opened iTunes and it created a new /Mac/Users/MYUSER/Music/iTunes directory so I compared an ls -la of the newly generated iTunes directory and the renamed copied directory and they matched/were the same.
I've read a few guides and see now that I did not copy over the /Mac/Users/Shared directory with my backup, and I cannot go back and grab it since I wiped my computer. Is this the problem?
I've also tried following This guide, and this guide but nothing has helped.
How do I fix the permissions problem?
NOTE: I am running Mac OS Sierra 10.12.6
Solution 1:
It ends up that you need to use the Mac Finder UI to set the permissions of the whole user home directory and not just the Music directory. I was able to fix the issue using the following steps:
- Opening Finder, navigate to my user/home directory (/Mac/Users/MYUSER) and show the "Get Info" pane
- Open the "Sharing and Permissions" drop down
- Clicking the Lock Icon and entering the User password
- Clicking the Gear Icon and selecting "Apply to enclosed items..."
This fixed all permissions issues I saw and iTunes was able to view and play music again.