Switch ownership of "normal" folders (tree): Disadvantages?

When I inspect my file system some of my "normal" (=non system) folders then I can see owners like
"S-1-5-21-15185678....." or "S-1-5-21-107808153

Why do only approx 30% of all folders have "S-1-5-21-151..." as owner and all others "Administrator"?

I dislike these "S-1-5-21-......" owners and would like to switch owner to "Administrators".

Are there any disadvantages?

My account name is "pet" which in turn is member of the "Administrators" group.

When I use now one of these "take ownership" tools then (as far as I can see) the next owner is my account "pet".
However I would like to assign "Administrators" instead. Is there a tool which allows (recursively) assignment of groups/other accounts as owner?

Peter

The numbers you see are the sid for a deleted user Windows doesn't see the name it sees those numbers called sid. It's not a good idea to mess with ownership as you can stop your system working. Users files are set to that user rights so admin can't get at them if admin has all rights a virus can full access if owned by users it's an extra security step

pstein said:

When I inspect my file system some of my "normal" (=non system) folders then I can see owners like
"S-1-5-21-15185678....." or "S-1-5-21-107808153

A good thing to note here, the “S-1-5-21” part of the SIDs suggest that they belong to user accounts. If Windows Explorer cannot evaluate an SID then it is an indication that the user associated with that SID has been deleted.

pstein said:

Why do only approx 30% of all folders have "S-1-5-21-151..." as owner and all others "Administrator"?

When you create a file system object, your user account becomes the owner of that item unless the item was created by a program running with administrative privileges, in which case the owner will typically be Administrators. If the builtin Administrator is listed as the owner, it is an indication that that user account created that item. The proportion of folders owned by “Administrator” on your system is oddly high.

pstein said:

I dislike these "S-1-5-21-......" owners and would like to switch owner to "Administrators".

Are there any disadvantages?

There’s no empirical difference. You’re taking ownership away from non-existent user “S-1-5-21-…” and giving it to all Administrators. All Administrators by default have the ability to change ownership of any file system item, so no disadvantages.

pstein said:

However I would like to assign "Administrators" instead. Is there a tool which allows (recursively) assignment of groups/other accounts as owner?

The takeown command can give ownership to the current user or Administrators, as the below line demonstrates. Use icacls to give ownership to any other user.

Code:

rem Give ownership to Administrators group for all child items in the current directory.
takeown /f * /a /r /d y