Do I have to do anything for file ACLs to work both before and after I reformat a computer?
- by Zian Choy
Let's say that I have a computer running Windows Vista with 2 users: Alice and Bob. Alice is the admin and Bob is a normal user. They each have files in their respective My Documents folders and Bob is not allowed to view Alice's files and Alice has to jump through a UAC elevation to view Bob's.
If Alice copies all the files on the computer to an external NTFS-formatted hard drive with the following 2
commands:
robocopy "E:\Bob's Files" "C:\Users\Bob\My Documents" /MIR
robocopy "E:\Alice's Files" "C:\Users\Alice\My Documents" /MIR
And then reformats the hard drive, installs a fresh copy of Windows, and creates 2 users named Alice and Bob on the computer, then will everything in the first paragraph be true after Alice copies the files back onto the internal hard drive? Assume that when the files are copied back over, she logs in as Bob and then copies Bob's files and likewise with her own files.
Possibly relevant: Alice and Bob also have passwords on their user accounts and they create new passwords after the computer is reformatted.
The main post has been tweaked slightly to make the question clearer. Answers that predate April 2011 are referring to an earlier version of this post.
