Goofy Mac issue...
MarkJFine You know a bit about Macs, so I figured I would ask you... A month or so back I had a power dip due to some storms in the area. It was really quick, like the power was going to go...
Forum Discussion
It's a permissions thing, similar to Linux. It's possible that the folder you created had admin permissions and it's asking you authenticate before you put something in there...
Incidentally, it's very rare that you'd need to reinstall the entire operating system, let alone wipe a disk.
Edit: Right click on one of the files and choose Get Info. At the bottom (Sharing & Permissions) it will tell you who the owner is and what privileges you might have (Read & Write is optimum). Then do the same on the folder you're trying to drag them into.
That said... I just noticed you're trying to copy them to an external drive. It's also possible that there could be a group ID issue on the drive, or, the drive wasn't formatted using a GUID Partition Map with a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition.
In short, there's a whole lot of things that could be going on here. Very hard to determine which it is without having a terminal to have a look-see.
The folder shows the right permissions, as in read and write, and for my 'account'. I don't believe it's the folder, as it does it with any folder, and practically any action. When I empty the trash, move a file, open Maps, open my AV GUI. That was just an example to show what's happening.
What I was doing there was just moving them from one place to another in a folder on the system drive, not copying them to an external drive, though it sometimes does the same thing when I actually do go to copy the files onto an external drive. Moving the files is what I've been doing most lately, so that's when it happens most.
None of this started until that power dip, now it's practically every day that this happens, sometimes four or five times. It's more annoying than anything else, but I don't understand why a reinstall didn't fix it. And now today the Music app won't stop opening. I've had this Mini on for 20 minutes and it's already opened four times for no reason whatsoever. This is the second time that's happened, with the first a few weeks ago, but the last time a restart fixed it.
I think the only other thing I can try is reinstalling Big Sur from a USB drive, but I don't know if that would be any different than what I already did, and the idea scares me, as I've ready too many posts of people trying to reinstall the Mac OS, following the instructions to a T, and bricking their units. Well, not bricking them, but causing a state where the unit has to go back to Apple to have the OS installed.
