Loss of share permissions on USB drive swap

[Guest Ken L]

I am having problems with the resetting of the share permissions I've

established when a USB drive is swapped. Here is the scenario . . .

 

I have two, USB2-based external hard drives that I want to use in rotation

for backups. While one drive is mounted on the system to receive the

current backups, the second drive is stored in a secure location, offsite,

for disaster recovery purposes. The online USB drive receives backups from

both the machine on which it is mounted, as well as several other machines

(through a share defined on the root of the USB drive). Share permissions

are set to allow full control to allow the remote machines to manage the

backups to the USB drive. All machines involved are Windows Server 2003

Standard R2 with SP2.

 

Problem I am having is when I swap the drive, once a week. I use the

"Safely Remove Hardware" icon to dismount the onsite drive and then mount

the drive that was offsite.

 

When I plug in the USB drive that was offsite, the share defined on the root

is still available, but the permissions on the share have been set back to

the defaults (Everyone, Read-Only). This then causes the backups on the

remote machines to fail since the share no longer has write permissions.

 

I am assuming this is a "feature" related to mountable drive security

(although I do not understand why the share is allowed to re-appear, even

though the permissions are reset).

 

I am resigned to the fact I'll probably have to modify the share permissions

any time I swap drives, but I would like to automate this, if possible..

 

I know the SETACLS tool can be used to set the permissions on a file or

folder. Is there a similar tool that allows the permissions to be set for a

"share"? Alternatively, can anyone provide me with a script that will

modify the share's ACL?

 

Thanks in advance for any assistance. Please post any responses to the

newsgroup.

 

Ken