So i decided to have a clean up of my digital life at the weekend and went through moving randomly placed files into correct directories and deleting odd snippets of useless information that hadn’t made it into Evernote. I found however that 95% of the time when i tried to move a file it would ask for my system admin password, and about 65% of the time instead of move the file after the password was entered it would just place a copy in the new location.
This really started to bug me as there was something obviously not right. I did manage to fix this manually by changing the permissions on each file from ‘everyone – custom’ to ‘everyone – no-access’. I tried setting this on the root folders and setting ‘apply to enclosed items’, This however didn’t seem to work.
My next step was to fix file permissions in ‘Disk Utility’ this did its usual job of fixing some but still no fix to my problem.
During my clean up I had wanted to ‘hide’ the hidden files and folders that were being displayed (i must have chosen to display them for some reason in the past), I remembered vaguely using a tool called ‘Onyx’ and so tried opening it olny to find that the version I had installed was not compatible with Lion, so I downloaded the most recent version and let it do its business.
Onyx came up with a problem that could not be fixed, and suggested that i restart into Lion recovery mode (which was news to me, as i wasn’t aware of this new feature in Lion). The lion recovery mode is accessed by holding down the cmd+R key during startup. I ran the repair disk from the disk utility in this recovery mode, which when Onyx was run after appears to have fixed the initial problems found.
Again though this did not fix the permissions problem, in fact this caused me bigger problems. I Use Evernote as a tool for becoming paperless, however after this last permission fix it became completely broken, every time it opened it would instantly crash, this was a major worry as i had offline notebooks that i dont think were backed up in my Timemachine backup (they are now most definitely backed up).
I finally fixed all my problems thanks to a link i found over at Mac-forums.com – (http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/101893-my-permissions-nightmare-happy-ending.html)
I downloaded the ACL Fix utility (i used this link as the one in the article didnt appear to work – http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26864/acl-fix and dragged my root folders into it (including my evernote data folder) and voila all works great.
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