osxfuse

I recently pulled a SATA hard drive out of a Linux box that I wanted to grab some files off of. I only had my Mac on hand, and I had a USB 3.0 to SATA hard drive adapter at the ready.

But when I plugged in the hard drive, macOS said it couldn't recognize the disk.

Makes sense, because macOS includes support for Apple's filesystems, not Linux (or even NTFS, Windows' preferred filesystem). There are commercial solutions you can buy, like Paragon Software's extFS for Mac, but that costs $39, and I don't want to deal with the licensing issues that may exist there if I just want to grab a few files off one hard drive.

Luckily, there are some open source libraries that allow at least read only access to ext4-formatted disks on macOS. Let's install them and use them to mount the drive:

First, install macfuse, using homebrew:

For my Raspberry Pi Time-Lapse App, I find myself having to either copy hundreds (or thousands!) of 3+ MB image files, or a 1-2 GB video file from a Raspberry Pi Zero W to my Mac.

Copying over the WiFi network works, but it's extremely slow (usually topping out around 5 Mbps... which means it could take a couple hours to copy). So I decided to finally try to mount the Raspberry Pi's drive directly on my MacBook Pro (running macOS Sierra 10.12). This is normally a bit tricky, because the Raspberry Pi uses the Linux ext4 filesystem—which is not compatible with either macOS or Windows!