New
#1
Admin wants to share a directory with non-admin users
There is a user, Dad, with admin privileges on a Windows 7 machine (this is me).
There are other users, kid1 and kid2, with no admin privileges (my kids ;-) )
I want to let kid1 and kid2 access the contents of a directory in my userspace C:\Users\Dad\ . In fact it's not at the top level, let's say it's C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud\photos (because it is). I want to let kid1 have read/write access and kid2 read only access.
I navigated my way to C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud and then right-clicked on photos, clicked on properties, clicked on the sharing tab, and did what looked like the sensible thing (gave the kids the required access).
I then logged in as kid2 and attempted to find my way to C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud\photos. I got there -- but on the way I saw far too much -- kid2 can see a complete list of the names of all files and directories in D:\Users\Dad (not ideal) and also names of all files and directories in C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud (which is not acceptable, because that is my entire life in the cloud).
Is this expected behaviour when sharing directories in Windows? If not, what did I do wrong?
If so then this is no good and I guess I need a workaround. The problem is that I am not at all sure that I can move the directory, because it part of a cloud storage service (like Dropbox, but a different company) and as far as I know that directory ...\ownCloud\photos (the one I want to share with my kids) must be a subdirectory of ...\ownCloud (the one that I really don't want my kids to be able to view the contents of). Also not a viable solution is re-organizing the directory structure of ownCloud (i.e. putting photos at the top and everything else in another directory called "not_for_kids" or whatever -- the problem with that solution is that this directory ownCloud is shared by me on many machines and if I start changing things around then various scripts running on other machines would immediately fail -- the directory structure cannot be messed with, I think I need to have most directory names in C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud not visible, but the entire directory C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud\photos visible).
I'm not worried whether the kids can access the directory directly or via some network share or anything -- I just don't want them to see the names of all files and directories in C:\Users\Dad\ownCloud. In unix this would be easy to do, because one has very fine control on who can see what; one could remove read access from C:\Users\Dad but still allow read access to subdirectories. How does one do that in Windows?
PS Lol "I'm having trouble sharing" (a clickable option on the Share window). That sometimes applies to my kids -- nice to see that it applies to me today.