Problems trying to backup from a Mac to an external hard drive

billtomz

Backing up a Quicken file to an external hard drive give the following text alert… You cannot save the file “Personal 2021 2022-01-22 (2).quickenbackup” because the volume is read only.

Try saving the file to another volume.

However, this file will backup to the Mac backup and, to a flash drive backup with no issues.

Jon

Is your Mac able to write files to that external hard drive otherwise (for example, copying a file using the Finder)?

If not, then the disk might be formatted as NTFS, which Mac OS can read but not write. To fully use it with a Mac, you'd have to backup the disk contents & then reformat it to something else (APFS if the disk is only to be used with Mac OS, exFAT if you want to use it with both Mac & Windows).

If that's not the problem, then I'd suggest opening Disk Utility & running First Aid on the drive to see if there's any issues with the drive itself.

billtomz

That is indeed the answer as this hard drive is formatted as a Windows NT File system. Thank you for your input.