Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

Liz_Atems_elisatems I understood what you meant by disabling ownership, although my terminology was probably a bit sloppy. 😛 I guess if you want to do a file transfer on a "normal" ix/ux system, you need to set files to be read/write for everyone or something similar. Even though OSX is Unix under the hood, Apple makes it as consumer friendly as possible, so disabling ownership makes sense to them. It also prevents a user's name from being associated with the file in perpetuity, which would be an important privacy consideration. I work in healthcare, and privacy is huge in our world. Less so in academia, although you still need to worry about FERPA.

I can see how masking this behavior for anyone but root could be confusing—it's impossible to see that you don't actually own a file if the OS is masking that from you. I rarely need to go into file ownership at this level, because both Apple and Microsoft shield those details from average users. However, details are good to know if you're debugging an inexplicable problem like this. 🙂

When you say you used the ditto(1) command, do you mean that you used it to clone your home folder from the system drive to your external drive once you'd created a folder there to hold it? I's guessing that's a command line utility, not GUI.

When you say you logged in as root, did you actually log in as a root user (I've never done that on OSX), or did you do a sudo? I guess you must have signed in if you're using a GUI utility. As I understand it, the default user on OSX is set as an administrator, but isn't the actual user, root.