If you don’t want other users on your system to access a folder, you can change folder permissions to restrict user access to folders.
One of the best things about the Windows folders is that they give you granular control over folder permissions. Using those permissions, you can control whether a user can access a folder and its content or not. When you are sharing your computer with other users, the folder permissions feature in Windows is useful and helpful in a lot of situations. For example, if you are sharing your computer with your children, you can make sure that they won’t be able to access your important documents folder by changing the folder permissions to restrict their user account.
Once a folder is restricted to a user, they will see Permission Denied error message when they try to access or open the files in the target folder. In this quick guide, let me show how you can change the folder permissions to restrict user access to folders in Windows.
::Note::
- The folder permissions feature is only available on the NTFS file system. As such, the folder you are trying to restrict should be in an NTFS formatted drive. If you are not sure, right-click on the drive that has the target folder, select Properties, and you will see the drive file system under the General tab. It should say “NTFS” right next to “File System”.
- The user account you are trying to restrict should already present.
- You should know the user account name.
- The procedure shown below can be followed exactly the same in Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Restrict User Access to Folders with Folder Permissions
1. First, find the folder you want to restrict and open its Properties from the right-click menu. In the Properties window, go to the “Security” tab and see if the user account you want to restrict is listed under the “Group or user name” section. If it is not, click on the “Edit” button. If you see the user name, skip to Step 4.
2. Since the username is not listed, we need to add it manually. To do that, click on the “Add” button under “Group or user name” section.
3. In this window, type the username of the target user in the blank field and click on the “Check names” button. This action will automatically fill in the proper user object name. For example, my user account name is “windowsloop” so I typed that and clicked on the Check Names button.
Once the user name is filled in, click on the “Ok” button.
4. Here, select the newly added user account under “Group and user name” and select the “Full Control” checkbox under the “Deny” column in the Permissions section. Click on the “Apply” button.
5. As soon as you click on the “Apply” button, Windows will show a warning message. Click on the “Yes” button.
6. Click on the “Ok” buttons in both windows to complete the procedure.
After changing the folder permission, the target user can no longer access the target folder. If they try to open it, he/she will see the “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder” message. When they click on the Continue button, all they see is the “You’ve been denied permission to access this folder” message.
Wrapping Up
That is all. I hope that helps. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible.
Here are a couple more articles on folder permission you might like to read.
cool but, is there a way to prevent SYSTEM to access or edit? in my example the logs of a game are just useless and make memory load even more so i try to delete them but they appear again, and again, and again, is there a way to prevent SYSTEM to access or edit the folder?
In that case, you need to take ownership of the folder and modify the SYSTEM permissions so that it doesn’t the write access.