MacFuse: Making Mac OS NTFS Literate
Problem:
I need to copy or save a file(s) from my trusty Apple machine to an NTFS formatted drive. Unfortunately, Mac OS only supports read from an NTFS drive.
Since I work with a lot of Microsoft products and Windows computers at work, I run into this kind of problem more often than I’d like to. In the past, I’ve developed intricate, roundabout ways of working past this issue – transferring to a Windows machine over FTP, using Boot Camp, or just convincing myself it’s not an important enough file transfer.
Recently, I found MacFuse, a mechanism based on FUSE (File-system in USErspace) for Linux. MacFuse allows the user to mount a number of different file systems (NTFS, ftpfs, sshfs) and write to them natively from Mac OS.
To set this up on your machine, first download MacFuse. It can be found at the Google project page. Second, get the NTFS read/write driver, NTFS-3G.
Install MacFuse. Then install NTFS-3G. Restart your computer (as recommended by the install client) and mount your NTFS drive. Drag a file from your Macintosh partition to the NTFS drive. Wow. That was sexy.
Enjoy.
