Why would an external harddrive switch to root owner

Does anyone know (or try a guess) what could cause an external hard drive to switch owners to root for no reason?
It had it for a while and it was owned by me as in
drwxrwxr-x 18 myself staff 680 Jul 12 11:22 externaldrive
Today for now reason it switched to
drwxrwxr-x@ 18 root wheel 680 Jul 12 11:22 externaldrive
com.apple.FinderInfo 32
(leaving me read only)
I changed it back, but this is very annoying and I would like to find the cause, especially if it starts hapening on a regular basis. I am not used to "black magic" happening on my Mac, like it happens every day on my windows computer at work:)
It's MacOS extended (journaled).
Thanks in advance

I concur with shldr2thewheel that it is of questionable practicality
With that said I assume you want to transfer data that no longer is resident on you HDD.
Enter Time Machine, locate the date and identify the data (note its location) and engage the restore function.
Open DISK UTILITY, select BURN, locate you data from the drop down menu and click Burn.
Beware of the disk capacity limitations.
Ciao.

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Jim

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michielgraaff wrote:
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Why would an external harddrive switch to root owner

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