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Error -50 when copying files from external drive

When copying from my external (I use on windows computer and all works fine) to my Mac it keeps giving me an error

if I copy other files from a different drive some work and some do the same thing. I’m confused and frustrated

any help would be great

thanks

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Oct 15, 2024 1:43 PM

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4 replies

Oct 16, 2024 5:26 PM in response to CraigRomburgh

So, copying may be writing to the NTFS drive (e.g., file metadata like modification dates) in a way that fails and the error kills the whole copy process.


Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with NTFS drive formats on basic macOS to speculate further - I use Paragon NTFS for Mac because I generally need to write to the drives I use. So read-only NTFS drives aren't a problem I ever have directly.


A third-party NTFS driver is something you could consider if you are using NTFS drives all the time. The big names in that space are Paragon and Tuxera (though not the only ones), plus the open source Mac-FUSE project. On Sequoia you probably have to jump through a couple of hoops in Recovery Mode to allow third party kexts to run to use any of these (my Sequoia machine is the one place I haven't installed much beyond basic Apple-provided apps).

Error -50 when copying files from external drive

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