Submission details
Copied files from some DVDs and CDs are given Read Only access
Files and folders copied from SOME DVDs or CDs are given Read Only access privileges by OS X. I can't modify any of the contents until manually setting the folder and enclosed items privileges to Read & Write. Sure, the files are Read Only on the CD but regularly people copy things from a CD because they want to edit them. This creates huge problems especially for novice users who copy files from Windows computers via DVD, then want to edit them on their Mac. The files can't be written to or deleted until the permissions are fixed.
Try explaining to a novice user why they don't have permission to edit their own files on their own computer, it's not fun. Explaining how to fix the problem is even less fun.
The Finder should default to giving Read & Write access to files copied from CD and DVD.
Provide a terminal command to revert to the older file-copy behaviour, just so admins who expect the old behaviour are not disadvantaged. Files that had specific access permissions before being copied to CD (such as shared folders, network security settings etc) will then retain their original privileges after being restored to the hard disk.
Low
Medium
Not fixed
Discussion (13 comments)
This is simply not true. In my line of work I have to copy files from CDs and DVDs clients or anyone else gives us all the time. I have never run in to this problem.
Surely, the act of copying is to put a duplicate of the item - in every sense of the word - in a new location. So, by definition, that's exactly what's happening.
The original item was NOT read-only, so therefore it's not making an identical duplicate, it's just doing its own thing.
I can verify this behaviour with certain CDs and DVDs on three systems running 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5. It may be the choice of burning software used by some people to burn their CDs with Windows, but when the same files and folders are copied to a Windows Vista computer or a Linux computer they have read-write access and with XP they appear as locked files (but again, not read-only).
I'm just saying it is annoying. Maybe it was done for a reason, maybe it's a bug. I don't really care, I'm just annoyed when so many clients who 'switch' to a Mac call me for tech support to ask me why they can't modify their own files. One recent client received scanned photos on almost 100 CDs from a photo lab after processing rolls of film over the years, and even after iPhoto imports the photos the files are still set as read-only, which creates all sorts of problems. Every time they import something they have to go to the iTunes library and reset everything to read-write access. Using GraphicConverter or Canon ImageBrowser gives the same results.
To be clear, then... the bug is that the file should come over as read/write, but locked, right? I agree with the point that the Finder should respect the locked flag (since it does have one). I've never heard that locked in Mac OS was any different than locked in Windows. Given that, I agree that it doesn't make sense to arbitrarily change permissions in order to replicate a locked status.
Basically I think if the file was unlocked and had read-write access when it was written to CD, it should have the same permissions and remain unlocked when written back to hard disk. If a user makes a Word file then copies it to CD, then copies it to another computer, they should be able to edit it immediately as normal.
If the user deliberately set the file to read-only mode, then locked it, then wrote the file to CD, the file should be read-only and locked after copying it back to the hard disk.
Windows 98 and 2000 (and I think early versions of XP) had a bug where all files copied from a CD were locked, regardless of their original status. Windows was based on DOS (which was written for floppy drives) which was too ancient and stupid to recognise that CD-ROM drives can't be written to, so it got around the problem by pretending that all files on the CD were locked meaning no applications would try to write to an open file on the CD. Unfortunately when files were copied from CD-ROM to hard disk the file system automatically assumed they were all locked, meaning you had to manually unlock the files before editing them. I'm just saying that the OS X annoyance I describe seems to be similar, in that files are given read-only access even though they were read-write before being added to the CD.
To sum it up, files should always retain their original permissions. If permissions are not available for some reason, the files should be given read-write access the same as any other new file you create on your computer. It is SOOOO frustrating for novice users when they can't edit files people give them on CDs. Most people don't know how to change a file's permissions and I do know people who have re-typed entire documents simply because they couldn't edit their existing ones that were copied from CDs.
I've never had this problem and I used to write CDs and DVDs with documents. I'm also pretty sure I've copied files over some times to edit them (because I work with a lot of Photoshop documents and so). Really, I never had this problem at all - and some DVD's came from my parent's Windows computer, so not even that made a difference...
DVDs written with the build-in disc-writer never gave me a problem at all... I copy over files regularly from discs with old projects on it, and I don't need to unlock them.
No i'm not trying to attack you, MicroWaveDave, I've honestly never had this problem...
Now those copied 'My Music' and 'My pictures' folders in Windows that are locked on my external hard disk (I was transferring data from an aunt to a new PC), they're annoying! MacOS X doesn't want to delete them, even after unlocking them!
jasper, was the target volume you were working with formatted as NTFS? If so, then Mac OS X can read from it, but not write to it. NTFS is essentially a closed format, so, IIRC, Apple is using drivers that were reverse engineered and not reliable for modification.
As far as I'm aware, all discs were just written with the basic applications. Deepburner Free on Windows, OS X burn folder on Mac. And I've never seen this problem. Now ebaur, I know that NTFS isn't accesibly to OS X to write, but CD's don't use NTFS formatting, now do they? Even if they did, you are still allowed to copy files over from there and rewrite them - you just can't rewrite on the volume itself...
Sorry, I was talking about your problem with the "My Music" and "My Pictures" folders... I thought you meant you couldn't delete them off of Windows. You mean you can't delete them in Mac OS X, on it's own local drive?
Did you look at the permissions, is this similar to what started this thread in the first place? Stuff copied from Windows directly, NTFS especially, is more likely to have permissions already attached to it that may not match Mac OS X. Since Mac OS X now supports ACLs in addition to normal Unix permissions, you might have some issues there... I've never tried it.
The problem I'm having (had) is that I copied 'My Documents' from a windows computer to put it on another computer using my FAT32 external hard disk. When I tried deleting all the folders, two of them didn't give me permission to delete: My Music and My Pictures. I unlocked them, but even them Finder wouldn't let me delete them - I had to enter my password as administrator and even then they didn't go away. The only solution was to go to a Windows computer and delete them from there. That's the only problem I've ever had with file permission, but I never had any problem with file permissions coming from discs. I don't really understand the fuzz and I don't understand the actual problem here - sounds more like you guys are doing something wrong when writing, because I have never, ever had that problem. I even gave it a try today and it didn't give me any problem...
Jasper you may have stumbled upon the exact same problem but in a different way. Sometimes the Mac seems to get confused with ownership and permissions. You're having the problem after copying the files from a hard disk, but I am describing a very similar problem relating to CDs. It also happens with network copies from Windows computers. Just because you've never had problems with CDs doesn't mean thousands of other people haven't had the problem. I've been called to fix at least sixteen computers with files that couldn't be modified after people copied the files off a Windows computer from a CD. Three users had almost exactly the same problem as you, they couldn't delete their 'My Documents' folder after copying it directly from a DVD, but they also couldn't modify any of their files inside the folder.
Maybe the problem CDs are written in a format with similar properties to NTFS format as ebaur mentions (which the Mac can read from, but not write to, therefore it treats everything is Read-Only). There are at least five very commonly used Windows CD burning applications, so just because you tried using only one app on your parents computer and it worked fine doesn't mean all the other applications work the same. You don't understand 'the fuzz' as you say and don't understand the actual problem, but you're describing an almost identical problem which is annoying you. Blaming the user for doing something wrong when writing the CDs is pretty stupid. I could say you are doing the wrong thing by copying the 'My Documents' 'My Pictures' and 'My Music' folders to your Mac's hard disk, not knowing that they are owned by Windows. But you're not wrong, it's not your fault at all. Mac OS X is at fault here, not you. You're doing everything right, but your Mac is making things difficult.
It's highly probable that the folders can't be deleted from your computer because they have a different owner. Your Windows computer effectively 'owns' the files, therefore it is allowed to delete the folders and files. Even admininstrators on the Mac may not be able to easily delete these files and may need to enable root-user access and use the command line to delete them. When working at AppleCentre, maybe ten percent of our tech-support work was due to incorrect file permissions. You're lucky you've only ever had one problem with permissions, because many people have a very tough time with them.
Changed title from [Copied files from a DVD or CD are given Read Only access] to [Copied files from some DVDs and CDs are given Read Only access].
Changed problem description.
I just did some more research on this matter and it turns out it's related to this other problem:
http://www.aquataskforce.com/view/262
which is better described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
The Mac simply doesn't understand the UDF format which is widely used by many Windows and Linux computers, along with various consumer DVD burners, video cameras and other devices. OS X gets confused when reading files, thinking they have read-only privileges or locked files or different owners, depending on what software was used to write the disc. Other systems don't suffer from this problem because they fully implement the 13 year old UDF standard, but OS X doesn't.
ebaur wrote on December 4, 2008, 9:11pm
I'm confused... this sounds like Mac OS X is trying to respect the setting on the files. "Locked" and "read only" are actually very similar and that may be how Apple decided to implement "locked" files. (Unless I'm mistaken, CD file systems don't have any concept of permissions.)
This sounds more like an annoying bug in Windows that sets the locked flag unnecessarily.