Source: Enabling NTFS write in macOS 10.15 Catalina the Open source way

This is a good article, and requires little tech knowledge. Copy it here for future reference. Kudos to the original author.

Highlighted Steps

  1. Have Command Line Tools for Xcode installed.

  2. Have Homebrew package manager installed.

  3. Install FUSE for macOS

  4. Install package ntfs-3g, brew install ntfs-3g

  5. Disable System Integrity Protection

  • Restart into Recovery mode by holding Command + R when starting.
  • Open Terminal application and input command: csrutil disable.
  • Restart
  1. Changing the system-wide command mount_ntfs
  • Mount root folder writable, sudo mount -uw /.
  • Backup original mount_ntfs, sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.original.
  • Switch to new mount_ntfs, sudo ln -s /usr/local/sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.
  1. Re-enable Mac System Integrity Protection
  • Restart into Recovery mode again.
  • Open Terminal application and input command: csrutil enable.
  • Restart
  1. Enjoy writing to NTFS!

NOTES: Unfortunately, you have to repeat this procedure every time you update to a new major release of macOS. However, it’s far better than doing it every restart. :)

Updates for Mac 11.x Big Sur

We have to use one time set-up now after upgrading to Mac 11.x Big Sur, b/c 1) we can’t mount / writable outside recovery mode, and 2) any changes in recovery mode will get reset after reboot.

  1. List all the disk partitions, diskutil list

  2. Find the NTFS partition and unmount it, sudo umount /dev/disk2s1

  3. Create the mount point, sudo mkdir /Volumes/NTFS

  4. Mount the NTFS partition, sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/NTFS -olocal -oallow_other