Looking for a way to prevent a file from being deleted in Windows XP, Vista, or 7? This can be a bit tricky in Windows since you have to delve into user permissions and file permissions.
If you have a shared folder that is accessible to computers on the network, then you also have to deal with share permissions in addition to NTFS permissions. In this post, I will walk you through the steps for preventing deletion of files.
If you want to prevent a single file from being deleted on your local machine, follow the steps below.
1. First, right-click on the file and choose Properties. You should be presented with a dialog box with several tabs. One of the tabs will be named Security.
If you do not see a Security tab, you may have to disable simple file sharing. You can read my previous post on how to turn off simple file sharing in order to set permissions on individual files and folders.
2. Next, click the Advanced button at the bottom of the security tab.
3. Now uncheck the “Inherit from parent the permission entries that apply to child objects” box.
A new dialog will pop up asking if you want to copy or remove the parent permissions. Go ahead and choose Copy, as this will allow us to work with the current permissions and modify them to our liking.
4. Now in the Permission Entries list box, you should remove any user or group that you do not want to have access to the file. If you want users to be able to read the file, modify the file, but simply not delete the file, click the user and click on Edit.
5. On the dialog box that pops up, you can now control each individual permission for that file or folder. This includes Traverse Folder, Create Files, Delete, Read Permissions, Change Permissions, etc.
6. If you want to allow the user to only read the file without being able to modify, delete, or change it, you would use the settings shown above, which includes only read permissions and the ability to read the data and execute the file.
You can play around with the various permissions to control the file or folder exactly as you desire. You can basically prevent file renaming, file deletion, file modification and more. Enjoy!
This all makes perfect sense, however I just can't get it to work. I want to make files accessible but not able to delete, in other words, read and execute. When I do everything as outlined, the file is accessible but still able to delete. The only way I can prevent the file from being able to delete is if I deny 'full control', but with this I am unable to access the file. I use Windows 7. Could it be some other setting that I am bypassing?