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Group Policy – Desktop only

Tags: Microsoft, Security, Windows

Dear All,
I have activated “Prevent access to drives from My Computer” tp restrict all drives. If I would like to only allow user to create files / folders in the desktop environment. How do I do that ?

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Re: desktop only

In reply to Group Policy – Desktop only

What exactly do you mean with “desktop environment”? The folder c:\users\<username>\desktop? That’s a folder, not an ‘environment’. How many different users?

Surely, a user also needs write access to the c:\users\<username>\appdata and c:\windows\temp to do anything useful. And if you have write access to a folder, you can save files there.

Log in as administrator and set access permissions (in right click>properties) for folders as you want them. You also might want to redirect My Documents and such folders to a subfolder of the desktop.

Finally, I’m afraid that any portable file manager the user can copy to his appdata folder (or his desktop folder) will allow access to everything allowed by the permissions. Such a file manager won’t honor the policies for My Computer and File Explorer. Nor, by the way, does Linux when running from DVD or USB-stick.

You’ve given yourself a rather difficult target.

[kees_b]

Reply To: Group Policy – Desktop only

In reply to Group Policy – Desktop only

Now navigate to User Configuration Administrative Templates Windows Components Windows Explorer. Then on the right side under Setting, double click on Prevent access to drives from My Computer. Select Enable then under Options from the drop down menu you can restrict a certain drive, a combination of drives, or restrict them all.

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• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by kees_b.

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