Maclord's Blog

Problem with writing to (NTFS-formatted) USB drives directly connected to your Mac? No more worries. You can solve the problem by enabling read-write (and delete) access to NTFS-formatted drives and flash memories.

It’s been 4 years since I wrote my post “Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac” which presented a free solution to solve the problem to writing to PC drives (or deleting files from them) with NTFS-3G and MacFuse. However, after the release of Mac OS X Lion, and then OS X Mountain Lion shortly thereafter, the suggested free solution became obsolete as the development of the MacFuse driver has been halted, and there’s no longer any official support for newer versions of Mac OS X. A new piece of open-source software called OSXFuse driver was thought to come to the rescue, however even with OSXFuse, NTFS-3G does not function properly in Lion and Mountain Lion; you will still get mounting errors every time your computer boots. So you risk to corrupt your hard drive / SSD and end up with possible data loss.

Why can’t you write to some volumes on the Mac which you also use (read & write) on the PC?

Mac OS X uses a file system called HFS+, whereas Windows uses the FAT32 and NTFS formats (which stands for NT File System) for its drives used for storage. While Mac OS X can read files on NTFS volumes, it can’t write or copy files to them – this includes the Bootcamp partition on your Mac’s hard drive (or SSD), although it can both read & write on FAT32 disks and drives. FAT32 is heading toward its end of life cycle due to its limitations such as that you cannot format a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB in size, and it cannot hold a single file larger than 4 GB. USB-memory drives with a storage capacity smaller than or equal to 4 GB are ideally formatted FAT32 with which you must be doing just fine on your Mac. However those that are larger have no choice but to have NTFS as their file system with which you’re gonna have this problem of writing on them on Mac OS X.

Fortunately, you can enable your Mac to write to NTFS writing on Mac OS X with relatively little trouble. Read more to find out about the low-cost solution which addresses the problem on Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion (aka Mac OS X 10.8).

Enter Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X

Paragon NTFS for Mac solves definitely the problem of mounting NTFS volumes as well as bringing the ability to read and write to those volumes flawlessly. A $19.95-solution from Paragon Software,  it is all you need in order to create, delete or modify any files on Windows NTFS drives (including your Bootcamp partition on your Mac if you installed Windows Vista or Windows 7 or later using the Bootcamp Utility) – and you won’t even remember there was ever a problem. Remove the barriers between NTFS and HFS with ease and confidence and no more worries about corrupting volumes and losing data.

Paragon NTFS has also been the first solution to support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Read the rest of this entry »

Advanced-level Mail.app users of Mac OS X must have noticed that as of Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) the feature of “bouncing messages back to sender” is gone!

There are ongoing debates whether this feature was useful (so as to help fight spam) or not – even totally unnecessary (since many spammers do not use real or valid e-mail addresses, there’s no address to bounce back the junk mail) – the latter probably being Apple’s motive to remove the feature.

For those of you, who need to restore this functionality, there’s good news for intermediate to advanced Mac OS X users who can manage to create an Automator service that will feature an AppleScript to run — at least by following a short simple series of instructions. (See also the screen recording video tutorial below)

Here are the step by step instructions to do so:

1. Launch Automator from your Applications folder
2. Create a new service.
3. At the top of the editing (workflow) pane, select “no input” pull-down menu item just following the label “Service receives”, and select “Mail.app” from the second pull-down menu. The setting should appear like “Service receives no input in Mail.app”
4. Locate “Get Selected Mail items” from the actions list on the left, and then drag it to the editing pane (that is the Workflow)
5. Locate “Run AppleScript” from the actions, and drag it to the workflow.
6. Edit the script so as to look as the following:
   on run {input, parameters}
   tell application "Mail"
      repeat with eachMessage in input
         bounce eachMessage
         delete eachMessage
      end repeat
   end tell
end run
7.  Save your Automator workflow with a name like “Bounce Mail”
8. In Mail(.app) select the message(s) you want to bounce, then under the “Mail” application menu, select “Services > Bounce Mail (or whatever you named when saving the service) menu item