I have a Mac which was reinstalled from scratch, and the owner accidentally changed her username when installing it. Current user id is "Jane" but old time machine backups were made when her user name was "Jan".
Now, she can't access her old backups.
The obvious solution is to go onto her backup drive and change the ownership of the hierarchy from "Jan" to "Jane" but every time I try, I hit the "operation not permitted" wall. I tried fixing the ACLs before executing "chown", but I get "operation not permitted" for that as well:
$ sudo su
# cd /Volumes/SeagateBackupDrive
# cd Backups.backupdb
# ls -led .
drwxr-xr-x@ 8 root _unknown 272 Sep 20 2014 .
0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
# chmod -a "everyone deny chown" .
# cd "Jane's MacbookPro"
# ls -led .
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 root _unknown 170 Feb 14 16:03 .
0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
# chmod -a "everyone deny chown" .
chmod: Failed to set ACL on file '.': Operation not permitted
I've tried all sorts of things like modifying the "writeattr" permission or looking for the uchg flag, but so far no luck.
This is on a Snow Leopard machine.