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MacOS Catalina, OneDrive, and case sensitive file systems

Over the weekend, I dusted off my old Macbook Air to search for some old family photos. I have not used the laptop for a long time, and it was completely out of charge. I plugged it in, and it quickly booted. Shortly after, I got bombarded with notifications that many of the applications needed updating, and that a new version of the OS was available.

 

I waited till I found the photos I was looking for, before attempting to upgrade anything. I also wanted to install OneDrive to get my old files to the cloud, so that I can access them from any of my devices, instead of dusting off old computers to get to them.

The MacOS upgrade experience has always been fantastic, and this one was no different. The OS upgrade files downloaded quickly and after a restart and a quick install, the Macbook Air was ready to go.  Upgrading the installed applications was also a breeze, however in the process I discovered that a large majority of the applications installed were not compatible with Catalina.

 

Since I have not used the Macbook Air in ages, it was an easy decision to delete these applications; I didn’t miss them, and in the future if I find I cannot access any of my legacy files, I can always find a converter, or a newer version of the application.

 

Next, I installed Office. The installation was smooth and quick, but when I tried to setup OneDrive, I got an error that OneDrive cannot create the folder in the location I selected. The error message mentioned that either I don’t have access to the folder, or that the filesystem is case-sensitive.

 

I checked the permissions on the folder, and made sure that I own it, and have read/write access to it. That did not solve the problem, and so I investigated the case-sensitivity issue.

Turns out that the directory I chose for OneDrive was on a filesystem that was case sensitive. I did not want to change that filesystem, but since the drive had a bit of space left, I fired off the “Disk Utility” application, and created a new volume for OneDrive. I chose “APFS(Encrypted)” format and limited the volume to 20GB.

The install went smoothly after that, and now my old files have a new life in the cloud.

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