Cannot open old webarchives in Big Sur

[EugW]

I have some older webarchives on my NAS (ext4). These were created on my Mac by yours truly about half a dozen years ago or so, and they are readable on Macs with previous versions of macOS. However, on Big Sur, I am getting this error message saying it can't verify it's free from malware because it's from an unidentified developer.

I guess Apple is an unidentified developer then. I don't know if it's because of missing metadata (since it's on a NAS) or what, but this is really irritating.

Is this is a bug or a feature? How do I get around it in Big Sur? It's getting really old having to run to a different Mac just to check web archives.

 

[Zazoh]

Apple removed the ability to set system preferences to allow downloads from "Anywhere."

If you go to terminal and type this:

sudo spctl --master-disable
(Enter PW for Account)

You'll get a bunch of warnings, you can exit terminal.

Now when you go to Apple | System Preferences | Security & Privacy | the "Anywhere" option should appear. You may have to click the lock to change it.

Due to malware, when you are done, you should change back to one of the top two options.

 

[EugW]

Apple removed the ability to set system preferences to allow downloads from "Anywhere."

If you go to terminal and type this:

sudo spctl --master-disable
(Enter PW for Account)

You'll get a bunch of warnings, you can exit terminal.

Now when you go to Apple | System Preferences | Security & Privacy | the "Anywhere" option should appear. You may have to click the lock to change it.

Due to malware, when you are done, you should change back to one of the top two options.

Thanks for the workaround. However, how come this is happening in Big Sur? These are webarchives created by Safari in macOS. Is this a new "feature"?

 

[Zazoh]

Thanks for the workaround. However, how come this is happening in Big Sur? These are webarchives created by Safari in macOS. Is this a new "feature"?

Did you change user name? Seems Big Sur doesn't recognize you as owner. But then again, it is an external web archive so Big Sur doesn't trust it.

I've never used a WebArchive so not familiar with the file type.

 

[EugW]

Did you change user name? Seems Big Sur doesn't recognize you as owner. But then again, it is an external web archive so Big Sur doesn't trust it.

I've never used a WebArchive so not familiar with the file type.

Same user name. A webarchive is just a web page that’s been downloaded to disk including the images, etc. It’s native to Safari.

 

[Zazoh]

Same user name. A webarchive is just a web page that’s been downloaded to disk including the images, etc. It’s native to Safari.

Okay, thanks. Just tried one. It has code that was on the page as well. I was able to open. I suspect, if you create a new one you will too. Must have to do with some type of permissions from the external source that didn't carry over. Even though you saved, the originals, if were of a webpage, not owned by you, could contain malicious code. Seems if you open once then you will not need to leave the security on your machine wide open. If you have dozens not a problem. If you have 100s or 1000s than there may be a better solution.

 

[me55]

Looks more like the quarantine flag is set on those files. No need to adjust system settings.

 

[EugW]

These webarchives were on the NAS with ext4. This seems to be a consistent problem. The webarchives are consistently failing. Or about maybe a third of them are failing.

However, what's interesting is that if I copy them to the Mac, they seem to copy, but they actually don't. Big Sur doesn't give a warning either.

I noticed this as I'm migrating some NAS files (particularly Mac ones) back to the Mac because of these sorts of issues. I've been copying over the directories to a Mac APFS drive and then comparing the original directory on the NAS vs the copied directory on the Mac drive.

One particular directory I copied over had a discrepancy of a couple hundred files amounting to almost 0.5 GB worth of data. Alarmed, I started going through every single subdirectory, a tedious process but I did it for the peace of mind. Eventually I came across one subdirectory which represented the bulk of the discrepancy, and yep, it was full of webarchives. I tried copying a few of them over, and Big Sur would start the copy process but then it would just not finish, and would give no warning. Luckily it's not an important batch of webarchives so I just won't bother bringing them over, esp. since many (if not all) of them appear to be corrupted somehow. Weirdly enough though, many of them did transfer over fine. The webarchives that I could transfer over still give me that error message if I try to read them in Safari, but I found a workaround (other than using an old Mac). If I try to open them in TextEdit, it says I shouldn't but nonetheless gives me the option to open them. If I do first open a webarchive in TextEdit and then close it again, then afterwards it usually will open normally in Big Sur's Safari.

BTW, I was running out of space on my iMac because of the Photos application. The Photos Library won't work on my ext4 NAS so I put it on a USB-C SSD. I got a big enough drive not just for the Photos Library but also to re-house all my other main files back on the Mac. I now have 3 TB of SSD goodness on my Mac, with 1 TB internal SSD and 2 TB in a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 SSD. I ran benchmarks on the drive in the thread I linked to above.