I’ve got an external drive that’s formatted as NTFS from my old Windows PC, and now I need to write files to it from my Mac, not just read. Right now I can only read ntfs drive on Mac with the built-in support, but I need full write access without risking data loss.
I’ve seen a bunch of “ntfs for mac” utilities when I googled, but it’s hard to tell what’s actually stable and safe. What are you all using in real life, and are there any tools you’d strongly recommend or avoid?
As far as I know, the newer version of macOS can read NTFS drives but unable to write NTFS, mainly because NTFS is a patent protected file system developed by Microsoft. Usually, the NTFS for Mac utility app supports NTFS read and write. However, most of them are not free. The free ones don’t support Apple Silicon Mac.
Yeah, you can’t copy files to NTFS formatted drive on Mac by default. By installing a third-party NTFS for Mac driver, then you will be able to write ntfs drive on mac.
Some of the best ntfs for mac apps:
I’m almost certain that Microsoft did not make any NTFS patents.
I think the reason NTFS write support isn’t common is because it is just really hard to create it’s functionality due to how advanced it is; fully atomic transactional writes, online self-healing, alternative streams and even concepts like reparsing which no other filesystem has (or probably can) implemented outside of Microsoft’s own ReFS.
I unfortunately can’t answer this question or give a solution to this issue because I forgot what I saw a long time ago. That being said, worst case scenario you can always use exFAT. That’s what I use
Sorry if this is a little off topic
Like 15 years ago I used NTFS-3G to do this on Mac. But since I no longer own a Mac I don’t know if this is still maintained or still works, especially if you have Apple Silicon.
I think it’s safe to assume that all of them use the same driver because developing a Filesystem driver from scratch is a massive undertaking and I doubt there are many developers that would do so for a niche usecase like this.
I am curious on why you need to write to it though. Using NTFS on anything not Windows is generally not a good idea. Even the most stable drivers can have issues due to the non-open nature of NTFS, which means everything is reverse engineered and may or may not be correct.
If you’re planning to do this for the long or even mid term, I’d recommend getting rid of NTFS entirely.
If you need a drive that both can write to, then that’s even more problematic. For that case exFAT or even FAT32 depending on your needs is likely a better fit.
The most stable / up to date I know is the one from paragon:
NTFS-3G / FUSE still works:
But it is not really user friendly, there is a tool called mounty which should help with that, but I never used it.