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AirPort Base Stations: Understanding Secure Shared Disks user account privileges

Learn about the different Secure Shared Disks user account privileges available.

If you're using an AirPort base station that supports a hard disk, you can you can set up individual folders in which users can store their files on the hard disk. These are called Secure Shared Disks user accounts. This article explains how read/write access works with these accounts when you set them up.

When you set up a Secure Shared Disks user account, there are three choices for File Sharing Access:

  • Not Allowed - Choose this setting if you do not want the user to be able to see or write files to the disk. This setting works well when you want to disable a person's access to the disk for a period of time.

  • Read Only - Choose this option to allow a user to see and open files from the disk, but not to edit them and then save them to the disk. Users with these privileges can, however, edit and save open files to other hard drives where that user has write permission.

  • Read and Write - Choose this option to allow a user to open, edit, and save files to the disk.

How to set up read/write access for a user

  1. Open AirPort Utility, located in the Applications > Utilities folder.

  2. Select the base station that you want to set up.

  3. Click Edit.

  4. Click Disks.

  5. Choose “With accounts” from the Secure Shared Disks pop-up menu.

  6. Click Add (+).

  7. Enter the user name and password for the user.

  8. Choose Read and Write, Read Only, or Not Allowed from the File Sharing Access pop-up menu, depending on the access privileges you want to assign the user.

  9. Click Save.

  10. Click Update.

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