title: MySQL starts, then stops, with error MY-013236, designated data directory /usr/local/mysql-8.0.18-macos10.14-x86_64/data/ is unusable
body: <p>I'm on a macOS, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack, and just installed MySQL 8.0.18 yesterday. It was up and running, I was creating schemas, and transacting with the localhost:3306 DB. Great!</p>
  
  <p>Today, the server won't startup. I changed nothing overnight, no updates. In System Preferences -> MySQL, I click start, go green for a second, then flips back to red. From the terminal, I get the following (when using "mysqld --initialize"):</p>
  
  <pre><code>2019-11-06T20:39:22.399042Z 0 [System] [MY-013169] [Server] /usr/local/mysql-8.0.18-macos10.14-x86_64/bin/mysqld (mysqld 8.0.18) initializing of server in progress as process 5705
  
  2019-11-06T20:39:22.401472Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010457] [Server] --initialize specified but the data directory has files in it. Aborting.
  
  2019-11-06T20:39:22.401484Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-013236] [Server] The designated data directory /usr/local/mysql-8.0.18-macos10.14-x86_64/data/ is unusable. You can remove all files that the server added to it.
  2019-11-06T20:39:22.401543Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting
  
  2019-11-06T20:39:22.401726Z 0 [System] [MY-010910] [Server] /usr/local/mysql-8.0.18-macos10.14-x86_64/bin/mysqld: Shutdown complete (mysqld 8.0.18)  MySQL Community Server - GPL.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've reviewed other posts suggesting adding the _mysql user as privileged user for the folder(s) in question, but it didn't work as shown:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-sh prettyprint-override"><code>sudo chown -R u+rwX,g+rwX,o-rwx /usr/local/mysql
  chown:u+rwX,g+rwX,o-rwx: illegal user name
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Can anyone help me get back to where I was yesterday? LOL?! Thanks!</p>