#fuse4x

I've been recently faced with the ever lasting problem - Apple, please do something about it? - of trying to connect an NTFS external hard drive to my laptop only to be surprised that I can read everything on the drive perfectly but can't write back to it.

It turns out that it's a very well-known thing that OS X only support reading for NTFS drives. Turning to google for a free solution, I was bombarded with a gazillion mentions of NTFS-3G and MacFUSE. Unfortunately, most of these mentions are quite outdated. I finally stumbled upon a nice way in http://fernandoff.posterous.com/ntfs-write-support-on-osx-lion-with-ntfs-3g-f and http://fernandoff.posterous.com/ntfs-3g-20120115-binary-installer.

Summing up the steps to get NTFS write up and running on - in my case - OS X Mountain Lion 10.8:

Download/install Fuse4x http://www.fuse4x.org/

Download/install NTFS-3G binary (special one compiled against fuse4x extracted from macports) https://github.com/downloads/fernandofig/ntfs-3g_osx_binary_image_builder/NTFS-3G.dmg

In the NTFS-3G run the Switch binary and accept changing the default NTFS mounting to the new NTFS-3G

Linux filebrowsers often are capable of mounting a vast amount of remove filesystems as if they were local folders. That usually works with FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, SMB and others.

Finder, on the other hand, is capable of doing the same for FTP, WebDAV, SMB and AFP - but not via SSH with SFTP.

To do so, you could spend some money for CyberDuck - or you go with the solution I will describe here for free.

Getting all the stuff

You will need three things: MacFuse, FUSE for OSX and Mac Fusion.

Additionally, you need to install sshfs. This is easily done by running "brew install fuse4x sshfs".

Mounting your first SSHFS

After installing all of them, open a terminal and enter "sshfs --version" which should output something along the following lines:

$ sshfs --version

SSHFS version 2.4.0

fuse4x library version: FUSE 2.8.7 / fuse4x 0.10.0

fuse: no mount point

Once you have SSHFS installed, you can start MacFusion.

Click on the little "+" in the bottom left corner, choose "SSHFS" and enter the connection details (A descriptive name, host, user, password and optional: path to the initial folder).

Preparation

Before the installation, check the path that Xcode is installed:

/usr/bin/xcode-select -print-path

Perhaps this result shows /Developer and if so, this should be changed in OS X Lion 10.7:

sudo /usr/bin/xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

Installation

Command below will install all of dependencies:

brew install fuse4x

Check how to install/upgrade the kernel extension by command below: