I’ve been struggling since Mojave came out to deal with it’s over-bearing expansion of SIP (“System Integrity Protection”), which is basically a super-root notion that blocks access – even to root – to lots of basic parts of the system, including obvious & mostly sensible ones like /System and /Library, but also less usefully things like any & all Time Machine backups.
Blocking access to Time Machine makes it very difficult to actually use Time Machine, since it’s then difficult to retrieve files from a backup (you have to then use the stupid ‘warp’ Time Machine interface, which is slow, ugly, and buggy).
Luckily, it turns out there is a fairly simple solution that isn’t disabling SIP entirely (which requires multiple reboots in order to do, so is typically quite disruptive & slow). It appears that any application granted Full Disk Access (System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Full Disk Access) can read Time Machine backups.
In case you’re unfamiliar, the symptoms of this problem include:
- Being unable to navigate into Time Machine backups in the Open / Save / etc dialogs.
- Being unable to see – through ls or similar tools – the contents of Time Machine backups via Terminal.
- Apps reporting errors like “The file “Foo” couldn’t be opened because you don’t have permission to view it” or bluntly “Operation not permitted” when trying to read something in a Time Machine backup.
There’s a strange & ironically very bad security quirk though – curiously, any tools run via Terminal inherit Terminal’s access (or lack thereof) to Full Disk Access. They don’t use whatever setting might be specified for them in the Security & Privacy preferences. This is pretty baffling, as it means to give Full Disk Access to anything you run via Terminal, you have to give it to everything you run via Terminal. Anything you specifically give Full Disk Access won’t actually receive it if it happens to be launched via the Terminal (which confused me for a while, since it’s so unintuitive).
I’m guessing whatever mechanism enforces all this so-called security is based in LaunchServices or somesuch – while the Finder and most things in general will launch apps via LaunchServices, as detached & independent process sessions, Terminal doesn’t – everything it runs, from the shells down, run under it in the process hierarchy, and seemingly share its security & privacy settings.
