How to avoid 'nagging' when copying files

Chen Tran - after my attention was drawn to WHICH transfers 'caused trouble', I isolated one instance of movement between external HDDs (there probably are others), where I applied your method of taking ownership of the drives - and sure enough the nagging became absent. Thank you so much.

A totally different issue is that when I wanted to report the above by way of reply to the email notifications I had received, I could not access this site - luckily I had documented the URL right at the start so was NOT prevented from contacting you. The URL got converted to

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/a/2056542 which resulted in '404 - Page not found'

Whenever you see this icon in explorer, that indicates that UAC will be involved in what you are trying to do.

Here's a good write-up on UAC.

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/uac-why-you-should-never-turn-it-off/

If you want to avoid those prompts, then the process that is doing the file copy must be running elevated with "run as administrator". Explorer does not run elevated.

The easiest way to do that is to launch a command prompt with "run as administrator". Then you can run command line programs to copy the files.

"Run as" UAC prompt.

The windows title will show "Administrator", and any program that you run from this prompt will have admin rights.

Robocopy is a powerful utility for copying files. That would be your best bet.

https://lazyadmin.nl/it/robocopy-ultimate-guide/

If you frequently run into this problem, then you have a permissions issue. The question that you would need to ask yourself is: why do I have these folders locked down so that only Administrators have update access?

If you don't have any major security requirements, then just grant the Users group full control. You can do this on both the source and destination folders. Caveat: you really need to think about which folders you do that to. For example, you would NOT want to modify permissions on the root of the C: drive. Or C:\Windows. You would only want to do that on data folders that you created.

If you are unsure about what permissions are defined on subfolders, you can set the permissions to what you want on a parent folder and then push the permissions to all subfolders and files.

There are plenty of sites on the net that document how to set NTFS permissions. I recommend that you browse a few of them to get better understanding of how to manage permissions. If you then have a specific question or problem, I'll certainly try to answer it for you.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=windows%20file%20permissions%20tutorial

UAC is there for your protection. It is not recommended that it be completely disabled.

What you are probably running into is a folder structure that has the following permissions.

Administrators:Full
Users:Read

The Windows explorer does not run elevated, so even if your account is a member of the Administrators group, you are still considered a "User". You have to go through the UAC prompt to be elevated to "Administrator".

Under normal usage, this should not be a problem. Folders that you normally use should have "Users" or your account granted full access as Chen Tran showed.

If you are doing a migration of some kind, then you might find that the source folders do not even grant Administrators access. In that case you would need to take ownership of the files so that you can modify the NTFS permissions and grant yourself access.

Can you give us an example of what you typically run into? How often do you have this issue? Are you copying/moving from local drives or from removable (USR attached) drives? What are the permissions on the folders that you are trying to copy/move? Is there a reason that your account does not have update permissions on these folders?