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Windows permissions, protecting a folder, but not the files

I have a customer that was  surprised to find that  someone accidentally deleted a subfolder on the server. We had been having DFS problems, so I am not entirely sure it was a person that did it. Anyhow, so that this does not happen in the future, he has asked me to protect certain subfolders from deletion. He does, however, want to let users edit the contents of the folder, as they need to do so in order to do their jobs. How can this be done? BTW- There is a LOT of data in these folders (aprox 1TB)
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Anutechnologies
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Anutechnologies- If I may ask you a followup question:  I am worried about conducting this procedure on a huge folder that, by the way, has no backup, other than the DFS folder it is replicated to on another site. Any thoughts on that?

Labsy- That is what I was thinking too, but the drive is 70% full, I am concerned that adding VSS would redline my capacity on that drive.
Well, you could take a USB drive and robocopy the files with permissions to get a backup before you start (or NT backup).  BTW, this is a great, cheap way to have quickly recoverable backups.  The downside is that you are limited in the number of backups you can do by size and you would lose everything if something happened, such as a fire or flooding.
Anutechnologies- I mean is there a risk in this procedure going wrong because of the size of the folder, and the amount of sub folders.
All I can say is there is always a risk.  Is there anything inherent? No, not really.  I would still suggest a backup before going ahead though.
Anutechnologies- One thing I just noticed- Delete is expressly denied- that would mean that users would not be able to delete files inside the folder?- that would be problematic. It would lead to growth of unnecessary files. Could I simply apply the changes to the folder, not to the folder contents?
You could do that, but you would have to specify each folder. Simply don't apply to files and subfolders and do them one at a time. The permissions here were not really intended for that granularity.