I’ve a really outdated backup drive I wish to learn on my Mac (M1 MBP, macOS 15 Sequoia) over USB — however for security I would like it read-only (to stop including a recent backup to its Time Machine partition, updating its entry timestamps, refreshing its Highlight metadata, writing .DS_Store information, or making another modifications).
All the current questions on this matter are for Intel Macs, or for mounting at boot-up, or for when you realize the drive’s UUID or don’t thoughts mounting it read-write to search out that out — none of which apply right here:
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The beneficial technique is to first add an entry to the
/and so forth/fstab(utilizingvifs) to both automount it read-only, or keep away from automounting it in any respect (so you possibly can then manually mount it read-only). However that wants the amount UUID(s) or label(s) — which I don’t know.And the beneficial method to discover UUIDs and labels is to attach the drive (and let it automount) — by which era the injury can have been performed!
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You’ll be able to in fact set Unix permissions on the drive (
chownand/or Finder’s Get Data) to disable write entry on your consumer — however that gained’t stop all system entry; and once more, by then the injury is completed. -
You used to have the ability to quickly stop any disks being automounted utilizing Aaron Burghardt’s Disk Arbitrator. However that’s 9 years outdated and gained’t run on Apple Silicon. (This seems like an excellent strategy, although — I’m shocked there’s no present app prefer it.)
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There are additionally recommendations to disable the Disk Arbitration service (
diskarbitrationd) — with warnings that it’s arduous to disable, and a few of the collateral injury persists even in case you can re-enable it. -
Some system administration software program (utilized by huge organisations to safe their {hardware}) can stop entry to exterior drives. However even when I may afford the money and time to get and arrange such software program, it’s inconceivable to totally take away afterward.
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I’ve even seen point out of specialist {hardware} that may block all writes — to be used by information forensics professionals, and neither reasonably priced nor accessible to the general public.
How can I see the information on a USB HD with out writing something to it first (or figuring out its UUID/label)?
