Add Protected Folders to Controlled Folder Access in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Hello mate,

The group policy setting from option 5 is still available for me.

Are you joined to a domain that is restricting this for you?

Are you able to use option 6 to manually apply the policy instead?

Hello Shawn, My mistake, I left off the "Microsoft" in front of "Defender Antivirus".

I am totally confused with this one, what I want to do is totally disable "Controlled folder access" so I have complete access to do what I want with the folders, it is impossible to list thousands of folders or apps.

Brink said:

No worries mate.

Were you able to disable "Controlled folder access" using option 5 or 6?

Usually, you could just turn off "Controlled folder access" using the other options.

I am a little confused, I didn't see anything about turning it off, all I saw was listing apps and folders. When I looked at group policy, it said that "Not configured" was the same as "Disabled".

Brink said:

Sorry, I just meant that you could turn off "Controlled folder access" using an option below.

How to Enable or Disable Controlled Folder Access in Windows 10

Tried powershell (Set-MpPreference -EnableControlledFolderAccess Disabled) and it returned a "general error".

In group policy, and I did look good, I don't have "Windows Defender Antivirus", I only have "Windows Defender Smartscreen".

What I did was use Disable_Controlled_Folder_Access.reg from "Option Four", but how can I validate that it is disabled?

Brink said:

You can check in Windows Security to see if it's grayed out and disabled.

See my post #108, it my IT has blocked access.

Brink said:

I suppose you could try accessing a folder that was previously blocked by "Controlled folder access" to see if you are able to now.

I have been able to access the folders, just had that failure by Excel to save. This just doesn't make sense, why are they making all the folders read only when they are not read only?

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BTW: I get the IT administrator has blocked access to the Ransomware page.