More on Permissions problems: Unable to copy Home directory; Unable to delete files

Unable to copy Home directory Brian Basgen reports trying to copy his entire Home directory to another hard drive for backup. He notes: "When it hit my Library directory, the system refused to continue the copy, explaining that I did not have the privileges to copy items from my own home directory! I am the admin of the system, and it is my own home directory."

We tried this and duplicated the symptom. At least in our case, the offending file was com.apple.MultipleUsers.plist, stored in Library/Preferences. It was listed as owned by System, rather than by the Home directory owner. Read and Write privileges were granted to System but not to any other users. Thus, the file would not copy. We are not sure if these permissions were changed in error or were deliberate. In any case, the solution is simple. Despite the lack of access to copy the file, we were still able to delete the file. When we tried to Empty Trash, we got a message that said we did not have sufficient permissions to delete the file, but it went ahead and deleted it anyway. After that, we could copy our Home directory with no problem.

Deleting locked files As an aside, when we later tried to delete the copy of the Home directory (it was on a Mac OS 9 partition), we got the same error message about insufficient privileges. This time the problem turned out to be that some AppleWorks files were listed as "Locked." When we unlocked them, we could delete everything. In general, problems with deleting files have been covered here before (see this item for example).