I used Macrium Reflect to restore a disk image. It can't restore to a smaller space even if the data fits so their solution is to use robocopy. It worked on everything except a bunch of errors while trying to copy NTFS security to files in \ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys, access denied. Should I care or forget about it and go on?

Hi, I would like to suggest you perform the following steps to change the permission for \ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys. 1. Right click on MachineKeys and click Properties. 2. Switch to Security tab and click Edit. 3. Click Add to add the current user account name for running robocopy. 4. Select Full control and click OK. 5. Click Advanced button and click Change Permissions button under Permissions tab. 6. Highlight the current user account and check Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object and click OK. After that, please run robocopy again to copy the \ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys. Regards,Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Thanks for the detailed info. What I was wondering more about was what these files are about and why they would have different permissions than every other file. I was restoring all these files to another drive, not the current system drive, and all other files, system files etc. all went through fine. The files themselves copied, just the error on trying to copy security settings. I've been running with the resulting disk for a while now and no error so it seems to have no negative effect. Had me concerned though that it might. Thanks

Hi, The MachineKeys folder stores certificate pair keys for both the computer and users. Both Certificate services and Internet Explorer use this folder. The default permissions on the folder may be misleading when you attempt to determine the minimum permissions that are necessary for proper installation and the accessing of certificates. For more information, please refer to the Microsoft KB article: Default permissions for the MachineKeys folders http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278381 I would like to confirm that can you copy the security settings successfully after changing the security settings for MachineKeys folder? If the issue persists, please also check if the following hotfixes can be applied to the situation you encountered? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950790 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973776 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979808 Regards, Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

I haven't run into any problems from this and I think I'm done messing with it. It doesn't seem like a good idea to open up permissions to security related files. If I run Windows Explorer as admin and and look at the security settings for this folder, for one it is a different folder than the KB article says, but that may be W7. It also has completely different permissions. Everyone has read/write, admin has full, but only for the folder. The files have their own set of permissions, windows says it can't identify who has ownership, and I don't think I want to change it. I tried having the admin with full permission apply to the files in the folder too but it just game me an error on each file as it tried to make this change. I did find in one of the KB articles a patch to robocopy to copy files in the backup mode. That may cure it next time I'm copying a whole disk. Actually if Macrium Reflect would fix there image software to allow restoring to a smaller (but big enough) partition then I wouldn't need to use robocopy. Thanks