Copy to NTFS Partition from Mac

By default, macOS cannot write to NTFS partitions. This is pretty bad since a lot of portable hard drives are in that format. I need to archive a large amount of files from my Mac to a portable hard drive so I looked into this. I remember in my previous Mac I installed some commercial software that can do this perfectly, but that was many years ago and costs unnecessary expense. So here is the free way to do it and also a nice way of copying large files to the newly mounted NTFS partition.

Mount The Partition

Mostly I follow the instructions here and use a combination of NTFS-3G and FUSE for macOS.

• Download and install from https://osxfuse.github.io/.
• Install NTFS-3G from Homebrew:

  brew install ntfs-3g
  

  Note that you might need to add the newly installed ntfs-3g binary to your PATH.

• Find the NTFS disk partition using

  diskutil list
  

• Remount the NTFS disk partition

  sudo umount /Volumes/<THE READ-ONLY NTFS DISK>
  sudo mkdir /Volumes/NTFS
  sudo ntfs-3g /dev/<YOUR NTFS PARTITION> /Volumes/NTFS -olocal -oallow-other
  

That’s it! The tutorial referred to above also mentioned something about auto-mount NTFS partitions. But that involves messing with the macOS system and can potentially introduce harmful software into the system. So I would recommend skipping those steps and any time you need to mount an NTFS hard drive, just manually mount it.

Copy Files to NTFS Partition

Even though the partition shows up after it is mounted using the above steps, copying files there is not very stable. When I tried to copy some large files there, it would often fail with messages that only contain numerical error code and no readable reason. A better way is to use rsync. I mostly followed the answers in this StackOverflow discuss. There is a fancy version, but the mostly straightforward solution that does the thing is

rsync -avP <PATH TO SOURCE> <PATH TO DEST>

You can use wildcard * for the source files and rsync will count how many files there are. It shows a progress bar for each file. As you may notice, the speed is much lower than the maximum value for a modern portable hard disk. I guess this is because NTFS-3g and/or FUSE need to handle to the NTFS format at the software level and there is not much support from the OS.

As a side note, if there are a lot of small files that need to be copied, it would be more efficient to first compress them into a .zip file or .tar.gz file.