I’ve given ODS full disk access in system permissions but when I run it (on a Mini (Intel) running macOS Sequoia 15.7.1) I see “need permission to fully scan” on the top bar of the ODS window when I’m sweeping the Macintosh HD internal drive. Any ideas as to what is up with this?
On macOS, files are protected by a number of different layers.
- One protection layer is sandboxing, which is helped by giving the app Full Disk Access.
- Another protection layer is UNIX permissions, i.e. file ownership and modes and access control lists. To bypass those, you can run the app as the UNIX superuser by using a Terminal command such as:
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
For data partitions and external disks, those two permissions are probably enough for you to be able to scan every file on the disk. But if you scan your root disk, you’ll find that there are folders such as /var/protected/trustd/private that the app still can’t fully read. It might be possible to get access to those folders by turning off System Integrity Protection, but I’ve never tried that. For now, at least, I just accept the limitation that there are some folders that the app doesn’t have permission to fully scan.
