NTFS read/write on macOS

Getting NTFS read and write on macOS with Mounty, fixing grayed out files with xattr, and the older ntfs-3g way that didn’t work for me.

tl;dr

get Mounty!

1brew cask install mounty

If after copying the files are garyed out and are inaccessible, it’s because of Finder’s xattr file attributes.

1# list attributes
2ls -l@

1# delete Finder attributes
2xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo FOO.ext

The old way

source This is more complicated than installing Mounty and didn’t work (the files didn’t show up in the Finder..)

 1# Install Command Line Tools
 2xcode-select --install
 3
 4# Install Homebrew
 5/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
 6
 7# Install ntfs-3g
 8brew install ntfs-3g
 9
10# create mount point
11sudo mkdir /Volumes/NTFS
12
13# determine your drive's partition
14diskutil list
15
16# unmount if partition was already mounted by Mac
17sudo umount /dev/disk2s1
18
19# mount the drive to the mount point you created
20sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/NTFS -olocal -oallow_other

1. First, download FUSE for macOS and install it. Use the default options when installing it.
2. Install Command Line Tools
3. Install Homebrew
4. Install ntfs-3g
5. Create mount point, /Volumes/NTFS in the example above
6. Determine your drive’s partition identifier, disk2s1 in the example above
7. Unmount partition if it was automatically mounted by your Mac
8. (Optional) Make an alias for the mount command e.g. mountntfs