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I have a hard drive (not external) with incremental backups of my system and documents. The computer may be accessed by others in some cases, and they will be using the same account with admin privileges. Also, there are many other computers attached to the same network. All of this makes me a little worry for the data on the drive, be it in case of a human error, or worse in case of ransomware. Because I use the drive exclusively for backups, there's no need for any user (including myself) or other programs besides the backuping app to access the drive. So I began to wonder, is there a way to limit the access to the drive to just one program in Windows?

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  • If everybody is using the same account [bad, bad idea] then everybody has the same privileges. You need to rethink who should have what access.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 24, 2020 at 16:25
  • @Tetsujin, The computer isn't normally accessed by others, however, there are some licensed software on the machine, and in case of my absence for any reason, others require full access to the machine in case of an emergency
    – Guiorgy
    Jul 24, 2020 at 16:49
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    Your issue is one of account management. Other users accessing the same account. That is what you need to avoid. You are trying to lock a door to which everyone has a key.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 24, 2020 at 17:03
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    Your thinking is backwards. It's not the app that has access perms, it's the user. See Deny application access to hard drive or volume in Windows 7+
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 24, 2020 at 18:01
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    No, as I've already said, in several different ways, Windows doesn't work like that. If you need that kind of granular control, use a Mac. You will still bang your head on the same wall if everybody has access to an admin account, though. You really need to rethink your strategy.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 25, 2020 at 13:25

1 Answer 1

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Create a separate standard account for the other users and protect the administrator account with a strong password.

Now from the administrator account, deny read, wrote and execute permissions on the standard user for that drive (You can do this from Properties > Permissions tab). Now the other users logging in from the standard account cannot access the drive.

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  • How will this allow the program access the drive if I am logged in with the other account, and won't a ransomware run with admin rights still be able to access the files?
    – Guiorgy
    Jul 24, 2020 at 16:52

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