How to Back Up and Restore NTFS and Share Permissions

One thing that has made the NTFS permissions piece of this simpler is the Icacls tool. Icacls was developed for Windows Vista as a replacement for tools such as Cacls, Xcacls, and Xcacls.vbs. It was also included in Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Backup and Restore of Share Permissions

To backup share permissions, export the Shares registry key.

1. Open Regedit to the following location:
   
   HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares 
2. Right-click the Shares registry key and select Export. Give it a file name such as shareperms.reg.

When you want to restore the permissions, double-click shareperms.reg to import it back into the registry.

Use the Reg tool to backup the registry key from the command line:

reg export HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares shareperms.reg

If you need to restore it at some point, just run:

reg import shareperms.reg

Backup and Restore of NTFS Permissions

Use this command to backup NTFS permissions:

icacls d:\data /save ntfsperms.txt /t /c

The /T switch allows it to get subfolder permissions too. The /C switch allows it to continue even if errors are encountered (although errors will still be displayed).

Use this command to restore them:

icacls d:\ /restore ntfsperms.txt

Note that in the command to save the permissions, I specified the target folder D:\Data, but when I restored them, I specified just D:\ as the target. Icacls is a little funky like that, and here’s why.

If you open the text file with the exported permissions (ntfsperms.txt in the above example), you’ll see that Icacls uses relative paths (in bold below). Underneath the relative paths are the permissions for the folders in Security Descriptor Definition Language (SDDL) format.

data D:AI(A;ID;FA;;;BA)(A;OICIIOID;GA;;;BA)(A;ID;FA;;;SY)(A;OICIIOID;GA;;;SY)(A;OICIID;0x1200a9;;;BU)(A;ID;0x1301bf;;;AU)(A;OICIIOID;SDGXGWGR;;;AU) data\folder1 D:AI(A;ID;FA;;;BA)(A;OICIIOID;GA;;;BA)(A;ID;FA;;;SY)(A;OICIIOID;GA;;;SY)(A;OICIID;0x1200a9;;;BU)(A;ID;0x1301bf;;;AU)(A;OICIIOID;SDGXGWGR;;;AU) data\folder2 D:AI(A;ID;FA;;;BA)(A;OICIIOID;GA;;;BA)(A;ID;FA;;;SY)(A;OICIIOID;GA;;;SY)(A;OICIID;0x1200a9;;;BU)(A;ID;0x1301bf;;;AU)(A;OICIIOID;SDGXGWGR;;;AU)

Had I specified D:\Data in the command to restore the permissions, it would have failed looking for a D:\Data\Data folder:

D:\>icacls d:\data /restore perms.txt
d:\data\data: The system cannot find the file specified.
Successfully processed 0 files; Failed processing 1 files

You might think specifying D:\ as the target in the restore command may somehow mess up the permissions on other folders at that level, but as you can see from the ntfsperms.txt output file, it only has information about the Data folder and subfolders, so that is all it will change.

Registry Extension

Group Policy includes the Registry preference extension. For computers or users, this extension allows you to:

• Copy multiple registry settings from a computer and apply those settings to other computers.
  
• Create, replace, or delete an individual registry value.
  
• Create an empty key, delete a key, or delete all values and subkeys in a key.
  
• Create collections (folders) to organize Registry preference items in the Group Policy Management Console, and so you can apply the same targeting to multiple Registry items.
  
• Create collections in the Group Policy Management Console that mirror the structure of keys in the registry on a selected computer.
  

Getting started

You can create and configure Registry preference items for any domain-based Group Policy object (GPO). You configure the settings by editing a GPO using the Group Policy Management Console. When editing a GPO, you can find this preference extension at the following location:
Computer Configuration or User Configuration
   └ Preferences
      └ Windows Settings
         └ Registry
For information about how to use this extension to create and configure a preference item, see the following topics:

• Create Multiple Registry Items Using the Registry Wizard
  
  
• Configure a Registry Item
  
  
• Configure Common Options
  
  
• Organize Registry Items