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Keeping Users from Deleting files

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by pozotech 1 view

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We have a W2k PDC that also serves as a file server. Users have home drives mapped to \\server\users\%username%. Is there a way to add, write and modify files (manily word & excel) without giving them the ability to delete files?

I have removed the delete right - however word and excel create temp files and since they can not be deleted - new files are not created. This is a real problem if you have an existing file that you want to rename and save as.

How are other handling this? We recently had an employee leave and delete many files before she left. Yes we have backup and regaind most of the files - Upper management does not want employees to be able to delete any files. Any good suggesttions?

Thanks.

5 replies

by hal 9000

This always depends on the access level that the user has. Generally speaking Data Entry people are unable to do things like this but people higher up the food chain are.

If you have someone in the position of Junior Manager or the like about all you can do is perform incremental backups on a very regular basis and maybe even mirror the data on the file server to another severs which the user can not access. That way when a new file is added or an existing file altered it will be copied to the backup server but it can not be deleted by a disgruntled worker who is leaving one way or another.

I've also seen [b]Time Bombs[/b] left on a system so a long while after a worker leaves the bomb goes off totally erasing everything on any switched on computer generally these are set to run at lunch time on a Friday afternoon when people are not really paying much attention.

The only real way to prevent loosing all the files is to keep doing a [b]Real Time Backup[/b] but even this is no guarantee that things will not be done to the system by someone sufficiently Peeved Off and with most of these incidents companies rely on their backup to recover. At one place that I went into after the System Admin had been disposed of under less than ideal circumstances I had to hack every computer for BIOS passwords and it only got worse from that point on. I particularly liked the idea where all the data was encrypted on the file server but the encryption keys where stored locally on the workstations it made life so much fun to repair that network.

by hal 9000

If the person involved has sufficient access there really is no answer here all you can do is rely on your backups and hope for the best. One of the worst that I've seen was a virus inserted onto a workstation which copied to every file and when it went off several weeks latter even the backup where of no use as they to where all infected. That was a really nasty one to recover from and took a lot of time & effort to bring back the data. The reason that it wasn't picked up by the Virus Scanners is that it wasn't let loose in the wild and was confined to this particular network.

It was a lovely virus as it copied itself just to the work files and deleted them without affecting anything else. The only unaffected files where the ones that had not been opened and they where few and far between of course the moment you opened one it immediately became infected so we where fighting a loosing battle until the AV provider came up with a fix for the problem. What made things even better was that several staff had left on the same day and it could have been anyone of them who was responsible so we never did track down who was responsible for that one.

Col

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