Permissions - MOVING and COPYING files and folders.

I received a question from a friend of mine today who is "learning" the ways of a Desktop Support Technician. Her question was: When you move files from one NTFS folder to another NTFS folder (e:\docs to e:\movedocs) on the same partition, doesn't the NTFS permissions STAY ?

First let us start by distinguishing the difference between "COPY" and "MOVE". Seems trivial, but very important.

When you COPY a file or folder to an NTFS drive, the COPIED file or folder takes on the permissions of the destination folder. When you MOVE a file or folder within a single NTFS drive, the MOVED file or folder retains its original permissions. Now here is where its gets a little tricky...

When you MOVE a file or folder from one NTFS drive to another NTFS drive, the MOVED file or folder takes on the permissions of the destination folder.

The differences in the MOVE(s) are because in one MOVE command you are moving data within one single NTFS volume. The second MOVE is when you are MOVING data between 2 NTFS volumes.

Let's look at it in laymen terms. Say you have a filing cabinet in your house. You organize it the way you want. Let's say you organize it alphabetically. Your accountant has a filing cabinet in her office. She organizes it by date. When you copy a file out of YOUR filing cabinet and give it to her, she will organize it according to HER filing system; which is by date. So the COPIED file takes on her filing structure (permissions). Now you are home again, and you are organizing your filing cabinet for house cleaning reasons. When you are MOVING stuff around in your filing cabinet, you still retain your alphabetical filing structure (permissions). So if you were to MOVE one file within your filing cabinet to another place within your filing cabinet, you will still place it in alphabetical order.

Now if you were to MOVE that file from your filing cabinet to your accounts filing cabinet, guess what will happen... You are right! It will inherit her filing structure (permissions).

We have not discussed one last thing. If you have a file on a FAT/FAT32 partition, and you MOVE or COPY it to a NTFS volume; the file or folder will inherit the permissionsIf you MOVE or COPY from a NTFS volume to a FAT/FAT32 drive, you lose all permission for that file or folder.

Comments

[Daryll]

Great Article, it might be helpful to also go over movement of encrypted or compressed files to different sources as thats another that can be confusing at times?

[Vick]

There are some ways for keeping all security permissions while moving files across NTFS partitions. Microsoft offers robocopy that do the job well in some easy cases. But if you need some extra options and gui interface you can't manage without 3rd party tools. For example, scriptlogic has a good one. I've found interesting thing on their site - comparison with other tools.
http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/securecopy/Comparesecurecopy.asp
It sounds very promising.

[VInu]

Great!!!, This is what I'm searchig for.. Really Good!!...

[amit]

that was explained in a simple n gud way... liked it.
thanx a lot

[Florence Aryemo]

Wandreful such a quck understanding good explaination. please help a gain with the use of wildcards in searching for files and folders