Not always in my experience.
As I stated above, the lock only means its not shared.
Why would an owner of the folder not have permission?
I could be totally wrong here. (Please let me know) But I know personally there has been times where I had a hard drive crash and I had to put in another hard drive. I reinstalled windows and attached the old hard drive. My files now have a lock on them when they didn't before. I am thinking this is because the files were attached to my user account, as they were not copied, they are directly on my hard drive. I then had to take ownership in order to make myself the owner, so this new user account was allowed to open them.
*Again please let me know if I am wrong, but this is my understanding.*
The reason locks appear on your files in the first place is the original windows account that has those files "attached to it" so to speak. When you install windows again, windows sees these files as attached to a different user account. It does this for security to protect your files from being accessed by someone else. The locks appear as the account associated with the files is no more on that system, so the account is not linked. When the new account goes to access them, (even if you name it the same) windows knows this is not the account the files were previously linked to. This is why you sometimes need to take ownership of your files in the first place sometimes making you the new owner of them.
This does not happen when you copy files to external storage because they were copied. Releasing that link for the copied files.
****I currently use
Windows 7 Professional and the Lock Icon appears on some files when I move them around from Desktop to folders on my C Drive (such as C:\Media). Essentially what I found is that the files are not shared outside of the Administrator access (you) so if anyone else logs into the computer and tries to access those files (with the lock icon) they will be prompted by UAC for credentials to continue. This is a general security measure and I'm not entirely sure if it is due to BitLocker or if it is built into Windows 7 (though I am leaning toward the latter).
What does this mean for you? Well if you are an administrator on your computer (as the main account often is) then nothing is different for you. You can access those files and move them around however you want. For anyone else who attempts to use your computer without being under your login credentials, they will be prompted to input your credentials before they have access to those files****
I copied the ****** paragraph from Darian Knight statement in the page below.
Source
Hopefully this is not seen as plagiarism as I gave the link to source....
I could be totally off please let me know. But I have experienced it before.
